It seems the Barbie movie is in on the longstanding joke that actresses Margot Robbie (who plays the title character in the film) and Emma Mackey (who plays Physicist Barbie) resemble one another to an uncanny degree—an opinion that has swept the internet as far back as 2019, when the Instagram account @morphy_me posted a few images morphing the two women’s faces together. Since then, perceived doppelgangers Robbie and Mackey have been closely linked.
In Barbie, the lookalikes became costars, and the joke of their similar appearance runs so deep that a bit of it almost made it into the script for the movie itself. “I’ve been getting told for years that I look like the girl from Sex Education, who’s Emma Mackey,” Robbie said in a recent interview with Buzzfeed alongside costar Ryan Gosling, who plays Ken (there are also puppies in the interview, so there’s that). Robbie even suggested that one of the reasons Mackey was cast in the film was because Robbie and the movie’s director Greta Gerwig thought it would be “funny” to reference their continued comparisons onscreen.
“We were going to do this whole joke about us looking similar,” Robbie said. “[But] once we got all dressed up as our Barbies, we were kind of like, ‘We don’t look that similar.’ When she’s got her brown hair, and I’ve got my blonde hair, so we didn’t put that joke in the movie.”
Mackey has also addressed the twinning comparisons a few times, including in an interview with Total Film, where she called the lookalike theories “funny” and spoke of how the buzz impacted on-set dynamics while shooting Barbie: “Margot has had the grace and humor to be able to play on that and allow me to be in the same film as her—bless her,” Mackey said. “It’s just a joke in real life. I’m like, ‘We don’t look anything like each other.’ I don’t mind it. It’s Margot Robbie. Are you kidding me? She’s the best. I look up to her so much. I don’t mind the comparisons. But it would be nice to move past that.”
Robbie also embraces the frequent comparisons, telling Buzzfeed “When people come up and say, ‘I loved you in Sex Education,’ I just say ‘Thank you. Thank you so much,’” she said.
