- Margot Robbie expressed her sadness at Babylon flopping at the box office
- It lost more than $60 million when it opened
- The 2022 film starred Robbie, Brad Pitt and others
Margot Robbie doesn’t understand why audiences and critics didn’t like Babylon.
The actress hopes that the 2022 film will be received better in the years to come than it did on release. Directed by La La Land’s Damian Chazelle, it was an infamous box office flop. It only took in $15 million in the US set against its $80 million budget, marking a $63 million loss.
Chatting on the Talking Pictures podcast, Robbie reflected fondly on the period piece, saying, “I love it… I know I am biased because I am very close to the project and I obviously believe in it, but I still can’t figure out why people hated it.
“I wonder if in 20 years people are going to be like, ‘Wait, Babylon didn’t do well at the time?’ Like when you hear that Shawshank Redemption was a failure at the time and you’re like, ‘How is that possible?’”
Who did Margot Robbie play in Babylon?
Robbie played aspiring actress turned starlet Nellie LaRoy. She was inspired by the real-life 30s superstar Clara Bow. One insight into her process for the part was how hard the creative team worked on figuring out her character’s accent.
“When we were trying to figure out what the accent should be for that character, I gave him 51 different versions of an accent,” Robbie said, of working with Chazelle.
“It was like doing a one woman show. We started off with like Boston. Nellie is from Boston. Here’s what she sounds like if she’s from Arkansas. Then I got specific. Here is Nellie if she was a mixture of Snookie from the Jersey Shore and Joe Pesci. Now I’m going to be a little bit of Fran Drescher mixed with Snookie. This is how specific we got. At one point I counted all the voice things I offered him at that point and it was 51.”
She starred alongside Brad Pitt, Diego Calva, Samara Weaving and Tobey Maguire in the three-hour, eight-minute epic. It was set amid Hollywood’s transition from silent films to ‘talkies’.
What else did she say on the podcast about Babylon?
Robbie labelled Chazelle’s approach to filmmaking as “thorough”.
She said, “Damian is so thorough. Do you know what I loved so much about working with him? I felt like no one had really put their foot to the floor with the gas, but he wanted that all the time.
“He wanted more always. Even when we were prepping.”
