Margot Robbie has admitted that she once faked her own death to play a trick on a babysitter.
The Australian actor stars as Barbie in Greta Gerwig’s highly anticipated film about the popular Mattel doll line. One trailer for the film sees Barbie ask her other doll friends about death.
Appearing on Zoe Ball’s BBC Radio 2 show on Thursday (20 July), Robbie, 33, recalled how she had once pretended to be dead as part of an elaborate prank she played on her adult babysitter.
“We got a new babysitter,” the Wolf of Wall Street star recalled. “I wanted my old babysitter back, Talia, who was like 16 and I thought she was so cool. And then we got this much older lady in and I was just not happy about it.”
“She told me to go have a bath and I didn’t want to, and she was very cranky and I thought, I’m going to show you.”
Robbie said she then hatched a plan to fake her own death and went to extreme lengths to convince her new babysitter it was real.
“I got a big kitchen knife and the ketchup and I lay, sprawled out naked on the tiles, covered myself in ketchup and put the kitchen knife,” she said.
“I waited for like 45 minutes for her to find me. But, it was worth the wait.”
Margot Robbie in ‘Barbie’— (Warner Bros Pictures)
Asked if the babysitter ran “screaming from the house”, the actor replied: “Oh yeah.”
“You produced your own death,” her Barbie co-star Gosling said, with Robbie proudly saying: “I did.”
Barbie arrived in cinemas on Friday (21 July), when the pop star-studded soundtrack was also released.
The film, directed by Lady Bird filmmaker Gerwig, was met with positive reviews and has gained an impressive score on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.
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In her five-star review for The Independent, film critic Clarisse Loughrey called Barbie “a near-miraculous achievement”.
“Barbie is joyous from minute to minute to minute,” she wrote. “But it’s where the film ends up that really cements the near-miraculousness of Gerwig’s achievement. Very late in the movie, a conversation is had that neatly sums up one of the great illusions of capitalism – that creations exist independently from those that created them.
“It’s why films and television shows get turned into ‘content’, and why writers and actors end up exploited and demeaned. Barbie, in its own sly, silly way, gets to the very heart of why these current [SAG-AFTRA and WGA] strikes are so necessary.”
Barbie is in cinemas now.
