Vanity Fair's August cover story featuring Margot Robbie is the interview that launched a thousandthink pieces and at least one excellent piece of satire. Its writer, Rich Cohen, was dragged online by commenters for his portrayal of Robbie (who he called "beautiful, not in that otherworldly, catwalk way but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance"), but not before lobbing a few insults at Australia. He continued:
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. 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 [...] In other words, it’s just like America, only different. When everyone here is awake, everyone there is asleep.
It turns out Robbie also thought the story was problematic, as evidenced by a televised interview posted Monday with Australian news show "The Project."
"I remember thinking, 'Oh, that was a really odd interview, I don't know how that's going to come out. And when I read it I was like, yeah, the tone of this is really weird," Robbie says, visibly cringing. "Like, I don't really know what he's trying to get at or play at. But I didn't expect there to be like an uproar about it."
Unfortunately, the interview was not, according to Robbie, the most "offensive, sexist, insulting, derogatory, disgusting" thing she's read about herself. In fact, she reads those kinds of articles "every day."
