We've all heard stories about actors who get carried away with their performances and those who try to truly inhabit their characters. Apparently, the set of I, Tonya got so wild that Margot Robbie ended up channeling her character and punching her co-star. Robbie plays the title character in the new movie about Tonya Harding and the most famous crime in the history of Olympic figure skating. During a recent screening of the new film in Toronto, the actress spoke about a time during filming that art began to imitate life and she punched Sebastian Stan in the head. According to Robbie...
We got so carried away that I genuinely forgot that we were on a film set and that I wasn't Tonya and that he wasn't Jeff. We got into, like a brawl. He slams my hand into the door. And I ended up storming off down the street, which was, like, the end of set, so I was just on the road in the real world. And you were coming after me, screaming, 'Where are you going?' I think you even said, 'Margot,' and I said, 'I'm going to the hospital because you broke my hand!' And I was so caught up in it and I think I punched you in the side of the head!
By all accounts the relationship between figure skater Tonya Harding and her one-time husband Jeff Gillooly was...we'll go with tumultuous. The idea that the two of them might, at one time, have gotten into a brawl, is certainly the sort of story one might have heard back then. Margot Robbie told the audience at the Toronto International Film Festival, which included our own Sean O'Connell, that she literally forgot that she was acting during at least one point during shooting, resulting in her punching co-star Sebastian Stan, who plays Gillooly, in retribution for slamming her hand in a car door. We'll assume she used the other hand. Unfortunately, we'll never get to see the scene as apparently it was cut from the final version of the movie.
Part of the reason the scene may have become so heated was that I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie told the actors to just "do whatever" while filming the scene, so the entire battle between the two was improv. Maybe it was the lack of following a script that allowed Margot Robbie to slip further into her character.
If all of this sounds a little bizarre, that's because it's supposed to. I, Tonya, isn't a straight dramatic adaptation of the most famous period in the skater's life, the point at which she was involved in a physical attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan. Instead, it's a mockumentary style black comedy.
Margot Robbie did not say whether this experience helped her to better understand her Suicide Squad co-star Jared Leto, who also reportedly tends to forget who he is while making movies.
