Margot Robbie came racing into the tucked-away bungalow she was renting here. She had returned from recording the voice of a talking dingo for a DreamWorks animated movie, and on an April afternoon was doing her best to clean up strewn clothes from overstuffed suitcases — evidence that an intended one-week visit to Los Angeles had stretched into a month.
“I’m sorry it’s so manic,” said this 25-year-old actress, who was born in Gold Coast, Australia, and lives in London, yet had not seen either city in a very long time.
“I’m always like, ‘No, it will calm down next week,’” she said in a more relaxed moment, stretched across a patio couch next to a faded pillow that said “God Save the Queen.”
“And then the following week ends up being crazier.” Ms. Robbie was on the latest leg of the globe-trotting journey that has consumed her since 2013. It began at roughly the moment that a worldwide audience discovered her in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” playing the no-nonsense lover-turned-wife of an unscrupulous broker played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
After three years of relentless film work, she is poised for two of her most prominent roles this summer, in franchise movies whose success could transform her from a wannabe to a deserves-to-be star.
First, she’ll be seen as a self-reliant and decidedly un-dainty Jane in “The Legend of Tarzan,” a new adventure of that jungle hero opening July 1. Then, on Aug. 5, she stars in “Suicide Squad,” based on the DC Comics series, as Harley Quinn, a cracked-up criminal psychologist who wields a baseball bat and a Brooklyn accent with equal ferocity.
Instead, Ms. Robbie said: “Any time I get near the top, I’m like, ‘There’s another mountain!’ The hustle continues.” The third of four siblings raised by a single mother, Ms. Robbie has been in almost perpetual motion since the end of 2010, when her contract ended on “Neighbours,” an Australian soap opera on which she played a free-spirited bisexual woman in search of her biological father.
Within days, she was on a plane to Los Angeles seeking representation and auditions for American TV pilots. She was quickly cast in the ABC period drama “Pan Am.”
“It’s so much more fun for people to describe it as winning the lottery and the overnight sensation,” she said. “But it was all very strategic: These are the steps that need to be accomplished.”
As Harley Quinn, Ms. Robbie once again had to put much of her body on display: The character almost always wears tiny shorts and is seen, in one trailer, changing into a tight T-shirt. Ms. Robbie said she could justify the wardrobe: Her character is “wearing hot pants because they’re sparkly and fun,” she said, not because “she wanted guys to look at her ass.”
But, she added: “As Margot, no, I don’t like wearing that. I’m eating burgers at lunchtime, and then you go do a scene where you’re hosed down and soaking wet in a white T-shirt, it’s so clingy and you’re self-conscious about it.” Mr. Ayer said that “I didn’t think denim overalls would be appropriate for that character” and that Ms. Robbie understood “that’s part of the iconography.”
Ms. Robbie said that when she is playing characters who are confident about their appearance — say, a self-assured war correspondent in the Tina Fey comedy “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” or a satirical version of herself, explaining subprime mortgages from a bubble bath in “The Big Short” — she is not necessarily feeling that way.
“You need to act like you think you’re really gorgeous,” she said, “and you need to be completely convinced with that, because everyone else will believe it, too.” Ms. Robbie said she can do that “when I’m really sure it’s not me.”
“It took a little while to get my head around the fact that, oh, you’re a commodity now, and there’s a value placed on your head,” she said. “Someone’s always going to be using your name, milking that and taking advantage of it. So you might as well let your friends do it.”
Asked if she felt she had achieved what she hoped for when she first came to Hollywood, Ms. Robbie thought for a moment before answering no. She couldn’t quite say what she wanted then but described a flight of fancy that had lately crossed her mind.
“Often I’m like, ‘I should’ve been a stuntwoman,’” she said. “I love doing stunts and being on set, but then you wouldn’t have to be famous.”
But then, she said, “You can’t really turn back the clock.”
