Margot Robbie’s recent comments about her career are sparking comparisons to Jennifer Lawrence, and here’s why.
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So, 2023 was pretty big for Margot, who starred in and produced the No. 1 movie of the year: Barbie.
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As I’m sure you’ll remember, a massive part of the global hype around Barbie was all the marketing and promotion, which pretty much spanned the entire summer.
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And while the pink-filled Barbie press tour may be over, Margot’s public commitments surrounding the movie are continuing into 2024 thanks to awards season.
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Speaking to Deadline in an interview published this week, the Wolf of Wall Street star reflected on Barbie’s cultural impact and revealed whether she plans to take time off following such a massive year.
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“Everyone’s like, ‘Are you having a break?’” she said. “And I’m like, ‘You do know I’m a producer, right? We don’t get a break.’”
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Margot added, “I also think everyone’s probably sick of the sight of me for now. I should probably disappear from screens for a while.”
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She continued, “Honestly, if I did another movie too soon, people would say, ‘Her again? We just did a whole summer with her. We’re over it.’ I don’t know what I’ll do next, but I hope it’s a little while away.”
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Now, as these comments have made the rounds online, fans have started preempting the “Jennifer Lawrenfication of Margot Robbie.”
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In case you’re unsure what this is referring to, Margot’s recent comments closely echo those given by Jennifer in 2021 when she explained her decision to take a break from the spotlight.
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For a bit of context, after she starred in the first Hunger Games movie in 2012, Jennifer released multiple films every single year right up until 2018 — making her the world’s highest-paid female actor for two consecutive years in 2015 and 2016.
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Of course, with each movie came its own press tour, and as a result, Jennifer was everywhere.
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But before long, people began to get tired of seeing her, and by 2019, the public disdain toward the once-beloved J.Law was so intense that she stopped acting altogether.
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In the two years that followed, Jennifer retreated almost entirely from the public eye, not appearing in a single movie. And upon her return in 2021, she gave fans a candid explanation as to why she felt the need to disappear.
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“I just think everybody had gotten sick of me. I’d gotten sick of me,” she told Vanity Fair during her comeback interview. “It had just gotten to a point where I couldn’t do anything right.”
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“If I walked a red carpet, it was, ‘Why didn’t she run?’… I think that I was people-pleasing for the majority of my life,” she continued. “Working made me feel like nobody could be mad at me: ‘Okay, I said yes, we’re doing it. Nobody’s mad.’ And then I felt like I reached a point where people were not pleased just by my existence.”
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With this in mind, it’s easy to assume that this is exactly the kind of oversaturation and public backlash that Margot is preempting in her Deadline interview, with fans suggesting that she’s taking a break from acting because she “doesn’t want to JLaw.”
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However, as people have been discussing online, the idea that actors should be forced to stop working out of fear of becoming annoying is super disheartening.
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“i get so sad when women in the industry think people ‘are sick of them’ or ‘don’t want to see them on screen for a while’ when the reality is that they’ve been extremely successful and are then showcased in various media outlets,” one fan wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
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Interestingly, over on Reddit, fans noted that Margot’s “savvy” move to step back before becoming overexposed isn’t something we typically see from male actors in Hollywood.
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“It’s so sad to see how some variation of this quote usually comes from a successful woman,” one person wrote in response to the Deadline quotes. “Jennifer Lawrence said it after back to back successes with Hunger Games, Silver Linings Playbook, Days of Future Past, and American Hustle. Taylor Swift said it after the success of 1989. And now Margot after Barbie.”
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They continued, “I can applaud her hyper awareness of potential public backlash to her success (build them up enough to tear them down, etc.), and I’m not saying this doesn’t apply to men also (The Rock, Kevin Hart, and Timothee Chalamet say hi), but none of those men have felt they needed to dull their well-deserved shine.”
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On the same thread, another user agreed that “oversaturation applies less to men than women” in Hollywood, adding that “no one complains about The Rock appearing in dozens of projects in a couple years.”
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Needless to say, Margot would be dearly missed by tons of fans if she decided to step away from acting for a while. However, with an Ocean’s Eleven prequel starring Margot and Ryan Gosling currently in development, we’ve still got plenty to look forward to.
