Big Beautiful Roles: Margot Robbie's 12 Best Performances, Ranked
More than two years on from Barbie, Margot Robbie makes her long-awaited return to the big screen in Kogonada’s supernatural rom-com, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. This is the director’s first foray into large-scale filmmaking, following his acclaimed independent features, Columbus and After Yang. The plot follows two strangers (Robbie and Colin Farrell) who meet at a friend’s wedding. Later on, they’ll discover a portal that allows them to revisit and share some of the most consequential moments from their lives.
This is the first in a handful of high-profile movies set to feature Robbie in the next 18 months or so—with Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights looking destined to cause a stir next year and a new, Robbie-led prequel to Ocean’s Eleven (co-starring her Barbie BFF Ryan Gosling) also said to be in the works. With all that, it feels like the right time to look back over the Australian megastar’s greatest roles, which we’ve ranked below in ascending order. Read on to discover more and use the guide below to find them on platforms like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
Can playing yourself for roughly a minute while sipping champagne in a bubble bath really be considered a great role? It hardly matters: when Adam McKay’s The Big Short was released, Robbie’s cameo was the only thing anyone was talking about. This is a role that seemed to confirm her place as the A-list female star of her generation.
The movie itself is a rip-roaring account of the 2008 financial crisis told from the POV of a group of smart and morally conflicted dudes who got rich by predicting it would happen. If you’re a fan of fast-talking movies that focus on that world (Margin Call and Dumb Money are both good examples), you’ll probably love it.
Robbie’s appearance in Asteroid City wasn’t a whole lot longer than her cameo in The Big Short, but it brought her into the rarified air of Wes Anderson’s troupe of Hollywood stars. Robbie’s role is short but memorable, appearing in a dream as the ghost of Augie Steenbeck’s (played by Jason Schwartzman) deceased wife.
The movie is Anderson’s first experiment in sci-fi, taking place in a Roswell-type town that appears to be visited by aliens. Imagine a cross between Moonrise Kingdom and The X Files, and you’ll have some idea of what to expect.
In 2018, Robbie starred as Queen Elisabeth I, opposite Saoirse Ronan’s Mary Stuart, in the period drama, Mary Queen of Scots. Beginning in 1561, it follows the 19-year-old Mary’s return to Scotland to reclaim her throne after the death of her husband—an act that her cousin Elisabeth is not entirely appreciative of.
The movie is a work of revisionist history, a story that retells historical events from a female POV—so, if you’re a fan of movies like The Favourite or Corsage, you might want to check it out.
Robbie had been unlucky that her first appearance as Harley Quinn happened to be in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad—a movie that was famously cut beyond recognition by the studio and, in the end, widely disliked. Luckily, Robbie was also the best part of it and got to have her own standalone, neon-tinted movie a few years later.
Birds of Prey involves a somewhat similar setup to Squad, with Quinn as the head of a motley crew of deadly women who must fight a local crime boss after her relationship with The Joker ends. If you appreciate Robbie’s eccentric performance in Gunn’s The Suicide Squad or like ragtag team-up movies in general, like Thunderbolts*, you’ll probably be into it.
Robbie makes her big screen return in 2025 for Kogonada’s Big Bold Beautiful Journey, a movie that has been the recipient of mixed reviews, though not for Robbie’s performance in the central role. As we mentioned above, the movie stars Robbie and Farrell as two strangers who meet at a friend’s wedding. Later on, they’ll discover a portal that allows them to revisit and share some of the most consequential moments from their lives.
This is a film that might appeal to fans of fantastical romantic movies, like About Time or The Time Traveller’s Wife. Just be warned, the levels of cringe and whimsy are a little high…
Over the years, Robbie has been nominated for a bunch of awards as both actress and producer. Her only Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress to date came for her performance as Kayla Pospisil in Bombshell. The movie is about the women who helped take down the disgraced former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes and stars, alongside Robbie, Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly and Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, with John Lithgow giving a daring performance as the monstrous Ailes.
Though the movie is mostly based on fact, Robbie’s character was largely fictional: a spiritual composite for Aisles’ many victims. If you appreciate other movies that focus on MeToo adjacent themes, like The Assistant or She Said, you might be interested in checking it out.
Babylon is a wildly passionate and expressive movie that unfortunately never quite found its audience upon release—but I must say, I’m starting to get the feeling that it’ll be rediscovered and championed sooner rather than later. The movie focuses on the chaotic early days of Hollywood movie production and the transition from silent to sound—think a little bit The Artist, a little bit La La Land and a little bit The Great Gatsby, all rolled into one.
In one of her most physical performances, Robbie is excellent as Nellie Laroy, an up-and-coming actress who rises as Brad Pitt’s ageing matinee idol, Jack Conrad, falls.
The Suicide Squad feels like an important movie in the Robbie canon for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was the project that brought James Gunn to DC during his Marvel exile; so, it essentially gave us not only Peacemaker but Superman and the new DCU—and if you like any of those, you’ll probably love it.
It also gave Robbie’s Quinn the Suicide Squad movie she deserved. The story is a bonkers version of a typical antihero team-up, with Quinn, Idris Elba’s Bloodsport, John Cena’s Peacemaker, and a few others, having to find a way to work together to overcome a—well, you should probably find that out for yourself.
I, Tonya is the movie that earned Robbie her first and so far only nomination for Best Actress at the Academy Awards. It’s also the first movie produced by LuckyChap, the production company she founded with her now husband, Tom Ackerley, in 2014, and from which movies like Emerald Fennel’s Promising Young Woman and Saltburn were both crafted.
I, Tonya is a darkly comic, true-crime story with a tone somewhere between Eddie the Eagle and Foxcatcher. The movie uses multiple POVs to tell the complicated story of Tonya Harding, a figure skater and two-time Olympian whose legacy was forever tainted when her rival, Nancy Kerrigan (played by Caitlin Carver here), was attacked.
The story goes that Robbie landed the role of Naomi in The Wolf of Wall Street when she went off script and slapped Leonardo DiCaprio during her audition. Whatever the case, her resulting performance is outstanding. She eats up every second of screen time and, incredibly, manages to go toe-to-toe with DiCaprio, despite being a relative Hollywood newcomer at the time. Needless to say, it sent her career into overdrive.
The movie itself is an absolute smash—an ideal chaser to The Big Short and a perfect movie for fans of the fast-paced debauchery of Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino. Not everyone was on board with it upon release, but that didn’t stop The Wolf of Wall Street from becoming Scorsese’s most successful movie at the box office. It is now considered his defining work of the 21st Century.
