Margot Robbie throws herself into character preparation “like a psychopath”.

The Australian actress told Cillian Murphy during a conversation for Variety’s Actors on Actors series that she tries to do as much preparation as possible before she shoots a film.

However, there was one instance when she took her preparation too far during the Covid-19 lockdown.

“I prep like a psychopath as well. I’ll prep as long as I possibly can,” she began. “I remember I started prepping one role and then Covid happened and so I ended up prepping the one role for like a year. I was like losing my mind by the end of it.

“My husband (Tom Ackerley) walked in and I was like making weird masks and stuff and I was like covered in paint and he’s like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I was like, ‘I think I’ve gone too far with this character. We need this to end. I need to get on set.'”

The Wolf of Wall Street star filmed both Amsterdam and Babylon in 2021 after the pandemic. The latter movie, directed by Damien Chazelle, was originally due to shoot in mid-2020.

Robbie, 33, explained that she does so much preparation and covers her scripts in “a bazillion notes and thoughts” so she can be free once she gets to set.

“Because then I can walk on set and just be like totally free. But if I hadn’t prepped, I’d be so terrified,” she stated. “(If I didn’t have an annotated script) then I’d be having all those thoughts on set as opposed to (being free).”

Robbie and Murphy were paired together for the conversation in honour of the Barbenheimer craze created by their movies Barbie and Oppenheimer this summer.

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