Margot Robbie has hinted at the risqué nature of a joke that was cut from the first page of the Barbie script.
The Australian actor plays the iconic doll in the forthcoming fantasy comedy film, while Ryan Gosling plays her beach-loving boyfriend, Ken.
As well as directing the project, Greta Gerwig also wrote the script with her filmmaker husband Noah Baumbach. Together, they made the decision not to show their work to the film studio, Warner Bros, nor Barbie manufacturer Mattel before they’d completed it.
In a new interview with Vogue, Robbie talked about the developments that the movie had undergone before reaching its finished product.
One of these involved a joke on page one of the script that, upon reading with her husband and co-production company boss Tom Ackerley, “sent their jaws to the floor”.
“We just looked at each other, pure panic on our faces,” Robbie remembers seeing the joke for the first time. “We were like, ‘Holy f***ing s**t’.”
After finishing the rest of Gerwig and Baumbach’s script, Robbie was impressed but doubtful that this version of the film would ever come to pass. “I think the first thing I said to Tom was, ‘This is so genius. It is such a shame that we’re never going to be able to make this movie.’”
The profile, published on Wednesday (24 May), goes on to state that apart from that mysterious, risqué joke, the script remained largely intact and will be reflected in the film that will hit cinemas this summer.
Elsewhere in the interview, Robbie revealed that Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot was once considered for the lead role, claiming that she possesses the essential “Barbie energy”.
“Because Gal Gadot is so impossibly beautiful, but you don’t hate her for being that beautiful, because she’s so genuinely sincere, and she’s so enthusiastically kind, that it’s almost dorky,” Robbie explained. “It’s like right before being a dork.”
Barbie will be released in cinemas on 21 July.
