Exclusive: Margot Robbie Sought After For Lead In Quentin Tarantino’s Final Movie
We've learned Quentin Tarantino wants Margot Robbie for the lead role of his final film.
The Oscar-winning director behind Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, and Inglourious Basterds among other great films has chosen the last movie he’ll be making, and he knows exactly who he wants in the starring role. Our trusted and proven sources tell us Margot Robbie is Quentin Tarantino’s choice for the lead role in his final film, The Movie Critic. If she signs on, she’ll be in front of Tarantino’s cameras in the fall.
The word from our sources fits with what we already knew about The Movie Critic. It was The Hollywood Reporter who broke the news about Tarantino’s final film last week, and the few details about that plot that leaked included a female lead and a setting of Los Angeles in the 1970s. The outlet also offered some interesting speculation about what the film will be about.
If THR is right, Margot Robbie — should Quentin Tarantino prove successful in recruiting her — will be playing the late Pauline Kael in The Movie Critic. Kael was an infamous critic who wrote at The New Yorker for decades, starting in the late 1960s. She was known as a maverick who often trashed films others were praising, praising movies the rest of the critics were trashing, and fighting with her bosses to get her words in print and unaltered.
If the site is right about Pauline Kael being the subject of Tarantino’s final film, it would add a certain bit of poetry to the filmmaker’s last feature. Kael’s final year as a film critic for The New Yorker was in 1991, the year before Tarantino’s feature directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs, hit theaters. With that little coincidental calendar notch, plus the director’s numerous quotes over the years about how influential Kael’s writing was in developing his aesthetic, and it seems like a perfect “full circle” situation.
If Margot Robbie does take Quentin Tarantino up on the offer to lead The Movie Critic, and if it is indeed Pauline Kael he wants her to play, then it would make the second time the Suicide Squad star played the fictional version of a real-life person in one of Tarantino’s films. Her first collaboration with the Jackie Brown director was in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Robbie played Sharon Tate, the actress and model who was one of the five murder victims of the Manson Family in August 1969.
Should Margot Robbie wind up working with Quentin Tarantino again, she’ll be filming The Movie Critic a couple of months after the release of her next highly anticipated blockbuster, Barbie. Billed as a romantic comedy, the film based on the iconic doll will bow in July, going head to head with Christopher Nolan’s historical thriller Oppenheimer.
