When we first saw that Margot Robbie had landed the cover of the new issue of Vanity Fair, we were excited.
The cover is gorgeous, shot on location by renowned photographer Patrick Demarchelier, Margot looks gorgeous and we love to see our Aussie stars making it big in Hollywood – and covering Vanity Fair is no mean feat.
But the minute we began to read the interview, we were left confused by author Rich Cohen’s uncomfortable profiling of the young star, and his description of Australia.
And we weren’t alone, the internet has since put out a collective, “What the?”
The profile, written by 47-year-old Cohen, is the latest in a long list of male journalists’ sexist profiles of young starlets.
Here’s a few of the “highlights” from the piece:
On her looks:
America is so far gone, we have to go to Australia to find a girl next door. In case you’ve missed it, her name is Margot Robbie. She is 26 and beautiful, not in that otherworldly, catwalk way but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance. She is blonde but dark at the roots. She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes. She can be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character.
On his first meeting with the star:
She wandered through the room like a second-semester freshman, finally at ease with the system. She stopped at tables along the way to talk to friends. I don’t remember what she was wearing, but it was simple, her hair combed around those painfully blue eyes. We sat in the corner. She looked at me and smiled.
On her sex scenes in Wolf of Wall Street:
I asked Robbie about the sex scenes. In Wolf, she partakes in some of the most graphic on-screen shenanigans I’ve ever seen, famously short-skirted in one scene, pushing a crawling DiCaprio away with the toe of her designer shoe, saying, ‘Mommy is just so sick and tired of wearing panties.’
And another particular favourite moment, Cohen’s, ahem, broad knowledge of our fine country:
As I said, she is from Australia. To understand her, you should think about what that means. Australia is America 50 years ago, sunny and slow, a throwback, which is why you go there for throwback people. They still live and die with the plot turns of soap operas in Melbourne and Perth, still dwell in a single mass market in Adelaide and Sydney. In the morning, they watch Australia’s Today show. In other words, it’s just like America, only different. When everyone here is awake, everyone there is asleep, which makes it a perfect perch from which to study our customs, habits, accents. An ambitious Australian actor views Hollywood the way the Martians view Earth at the beginning of The War of the Worlds. Which was Robbie.
However it’s not the first time a male journalist has been ridiculed for his sexist, and shall we just say creepy profile of a young starlet.
In 2013 Stephen Marche penned a piece for Esquire magazine on Megan Fox in which he described her skin as “the colour the moon possesses in the thin air of northern winters.”
The symmetry of her face, up close, is genuinely shocking. The lip on the left curves exactly the same way as the lip on the right. The eyes match exactly. The brow is in perfect balance, like a problem of logic, like a visual labyrinth. It’s not really even that beautiful. It’s closer to the sublime, a force of nature, the patterns of waves crisscrossing a lake, snow avalanching down the side of a mountain, an elaborately camouflaged butterfly. What she is is flawless. There is absolutely nothing wrong with her.
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