When Israel’s Ynon Kreiz became Mattel’s fourth CEO in 2018, he knew that if he wanted to stay in the job, he had to find a way to revitalize the powerful toy company. His experience at Fox Kids Europe and the content creation company Endemol, among others, helped him understand that the key to achieving this was through the world of entertainment.
Determined to do something similar to what Marvel had achieved years before, shortly after taking office he invited several Hollywood stars to the elegant Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills to launch the project. One of them was Margot Robbie, whom Kreiz and Robbie Brenner, the Dallas Buyers Club producer who now runs Mattel Films, had identified as the ideal candidate to play Barbie in a live-action film about the iconic doll.
Despite the fact that in her childhood she did not have Barbies and only played with those of a cousin, the Australian saw in the invitation a great opportunity for her production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, whose first project I, Tonya, had received three Oscar nominations. Robbie got what he wanted, knowing it wouldn’t be an easy task.
Projects prior to Kreiz’s arrival had gone as far as casting Amy Schumer and Anne Hathaway in the role, or hiring Patty Jenkins as director, but they hadn’t come to fruition because the company was reluctant to limit Barbie’s image to just one face (there are currently 175 different models). This time, however, the goal was different. Mattel was not interested in selling more dolls but in creating a film and television universe out of the brand.
Today it can be said that Robbie could not have been more successful, because everyone is talking about Barbenheimer, the phenomenon that brought Barbie to screens around the world in the same weekend as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. It is that it was she who summoned Greta Gerwig to continue her career as a director after Lady Bird and Little Women, and gave her complete freedom to write a revolutionary script with her husband, the multi-award winning Noah Baumbach, without even demanding that she be the protagonist of the film.
As he told in an interview with the New York Times, when the pandemic had just ended, Robbie thought that his proposal was too daring, but he decided to go for it: “I knew that the executives from Mattel and Warner Brothers had to read the script on a Friday, after having drunk a couple of glasses of their favorite cocktail. I thought they were going to tell me no, but if they were a little lighthearted, they would be more open and realize how much fun the movie could be.”
To his surprise, they said yes, and although he had to negotiate some details, Robbie was able to give Gerwig complete freedom in a blockbuster that cost almost 130 million euros, to which Warner added another 88 million in marketing.
Margot, whose company released the telefilm The Boston Strangler with Keira Knightley this year, has three films finished and another 29 in development, was also the one who convinced Ryan Gosling to play Ken, in what many consider one of the best roles of his career.
Robbie sent her the script along with a set of dolls, which her two daughters with Eva Mendes, Esmeralda Amada and Amada Lee, ages 8 and 7, quickly adopted. When Ryan saw Ken end up face down in the mud next to a squeezed lemon, he identified with the character.
When she lives in Barbieland with Barbie, a world in which women have achieved all the ideals of the feminist struggle, she is simply someone the beautiful blonde has to dance to and discovers her potential when, without being invited by her, he decides to accompany her on her foray into the real world.
Margot also promised him that if he agreed to participate, he would give him a gift every day of filming, something that he fulfilled to the letter during the five months they were in front of the cameras: “I thought that he would not be able to keep his promise. Every day I got a gift wrapped in pink paper, from Barbie to Ken. I told her that she didn’t have to keep doing it, that I was sure she had other occupations, like starring in a movie, producing it, or running a company,” Reynolds explained to the New York Times in the same interview, to which Robbie commented: “When I commit to a joke, I keep it.”
