Margot Robbie has revealed that she and director Greta Gerwig “thought it would be funny” to cast her celebrity doppelgänger Emma Mackey in Barbie.
For years, fans have pointed out the physical similarities between Robbie, 33, and Mackey, 27.
While the Sex Education star admitted in 2022 that it “would be nice to move past” the comparisons, Robbie recently said that she and Gerwig intentionally played directly into them.
“I’ve been getting told for years that I look like the girl from Sex Education, who is Emma Mackey,” Robbie said in a new video interview with BuzzFeed.
“[Mackey] plays one of the Barbies in the movie pretty much because Greta and I thought it would be funny. We were gonna do this whole joke about us looking similar,” she said.
However, the joke didn’t end up making the final cut after they realised they didn’t “look that similar” once they were in costume.
“Once we got all dressed up as our Barbies, we were kind of like, ‘We don’t actually look that similar,’” the Australian actor recalled. “Like, when she’s got her brown hair and I've got my blonde hair, we don't look THAT similar, so we didn’t put that joke in the movie.”
Margot Robbie— (AFP via Getty Images)
Twitter was sent into a frenzy when it was first announced that Mackey had been cast alongside Robbie’s eponymous Mattel doll who, after getting booted from Barbieland, sets off to the human world to find true happiness.
“Need Emma Mackey and Margot Robbie to be siblings in Barbie, only fitting,” one fan enthused at the time.
Previously commenting on the matter in a separate interview with The Independent, Mackey said that although the comparisons are “lovely”, she would rather “people focus on the jobs that we’re both doing rather than what we look like”.
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“Hollywood churns out people who look the same and we love to put people in boxes,” she added. “It’s just a thing that we do as a species, we categorise people, we always have.”
Ahead of Barbie’s cinematic release on 21 July, the first reactions from critics were overwhelmingly positive and called for Ryan Gosling to get an Oscar for his “scene-stealing” role.
Speaking to People in a new interview, Gosling, 42, who stars as Barbie’s boyfriend Ken, shared that Robbie raised money for charity by mandating “pink days” on set and fining her co-stars and crew members if they failed to wear a pink item of clothing.
