Your fave and ours Margot Robbie stars in the upcoming I, Tonya, which is all about one of the juiciest scandals in the history of American sport, but apparently, it took her a while to cotton on to the fact that the film is actually based on a true story.
In 1994, figure skater Tonya Harding found herself at the centre of a controversy, when her ex-husband hired an assailant to attack her competitor Nancy Kerrigan and break her leg, so that she would be unable to compete in the upcoming Winter Olympics in Lillehammer.
Kerrigan was only bruised in the attack, and both skaters would go on to compete in the Olympics, creating a media feeding frenzy like nothing the sport had seen before, with reporters camping out at their practice sessions and following their every move.
Margot Robbie plays Tonya Harding in the upcoming film, but in the lead-up to its Toronto Film Festival premiere, she admitted to Vanity Fair that it took her a while to realise that the wild and woolly script had its basis in reality.
“I think I was about four years old when the incident took place,” she said. “I was in Australia and totally unaware of the whole incident and the crazy controversy. To be honest, when I read the script, I didn’t know who Tonya Harding was, and I didn’t realise it was a true story,” she continued. “I thought it was entirely fictionalised and our writer Steve was so creative to come up with the quirky characters and absurd incidents.”
After realising that the film was based around real people, Robbie says she disappeared into an internet rabbit hole, watching every YouTube video she could find of Harding, and meeting with her to discuss the infamous events of 1994. She said of that experience:
“I think it is a lot for someone to have the most traumatic events of their life encompassed in a two-hour film. I feel like you have to be very brave to let someone do that. I don’t know if I could do that, and she handled it incredibly … I don’t know what I was expecting, but I had spent so many hours watching her every interview and every bit of skating. I feel like I had done nothing but watch and listen to Tonya for the last year—so it was really weird to see that person literally in front of me. It was a bizarre experience. She was so kind. I was taken aback by how worried she was about me, weirdly. After all the things she has been through, she just kept asking if I was O.K.”
The actress also trained in figure skating, working with a choreographer who had created some of Harding’s routines. “I played ice hockey at one point, but this was a whole new world of pain” said Robbie, who ruptured a disc at one point during filming.
An Australian release date for I, Tonya, which stars Sebastian Stan and Caitlin Carver alongside Margot Robbie, has yet to be confirmed.
