‘Barbie’ star Margot Robbie says selling her liquor brand was easier than selling her $1.4 billion movie idea
Considering mania and obsession completely over Barbie movie last summer, one might guess that it was an easy sell to Hollywood studios. It’s wrong.
“Movies are a crazy business where you’re selling something intangible, an idea,” said Margot Robbie, the Australian actress who played Barbie in the popular film that grossed $1.4 billion at the box office. The Times. “You don’t know how much it will be made, who will see it, or how it will be received.”
The most definitive thing for Robbie is the recent launch of his gin brand Papa Salt, inspired by his many nights out clubbing in London’s Clapham area.
“This sounds very straightforward, it’s easy to predict things,” said Robbie about entering the liquor business. “You can put this on a spreadsheet the way you can put a movie idea.”
In other words, it seems more about selling a product than an idea, and she has a group of friends—Charlie Maas and Regan Riskas and her husband Tom Ackerley—in business with her.
The idea for the subtly flavored gin goes back to when Robbie packed vanilla tea bags in his bag for a night at Infernos, a nightclub he frequented along with “thousands of other Aussie Londoners,” he says. The Times. Gin and tonics were his go-to drink, but that didn’t mean they always tasted good.
“If you put one in a bad G&T, it suddenly becomes good. My bag was full of them,” he recalled. “I used to buy rounds and just hold them in my hand [out the tea bags].”
Robbie and his Papa Salt co-founders were on a mission to create a gin that “could complement any soda, taste great with tonic, and make a perfect martini,” according to the company’s website. It took them 59 recipes to get there, but now they sell “an easy-drinking gin that celebrates the subtle flavors of Australian botanicals,” like bright wax flower, hibiscus, and citrus peel. Nutty wattleseed (an edible seed from Australia), pink peppercorn, and oyster shell also complement the flavors.
While it was easier to sell the idea of a gin product than a movie, that didn’t mean it wasn’t easy at all to make great tasting alcohol. Robbie went to Australia to meet Brian Restall, the owner of the most famous distiller there, and they “totally hit it off” together discussing the idea of the product. But it didn’t take long for Restall to be sold on the idea, according to a Forbes Australia the subject.
Margot Robbie is worth it
While Barbie no doubt he got Robbie back in the limelight last summer, he’s been in some hit movies and TV shows. He started acting in an Australian soap Neighbors, in which he appeared in more than 300 episodes. She played Jordan Belfort’s beautiful wife Naomi Lapaglia in the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street, which made nearly 407 million at the box office. He stared at Jane Ported The Legend of Tarzan and as Harley Quinn in the Suicide Squad movies.
But her biggest honor came when she won an Academy Award for her role as Tonya Harding in the biopic Me, Tonyawhich earned her the role of Queen Elizabeth I Mary Queen of Scots. However, sadly, he did not win an Academy Award for his performance in it Barbie—and neither did producer Greta Gerwig in what is considered one of the biggest scams in awards history. Barbie was the highest-grossing film of 2023, and Robbie brought home the biggest payday of any woman in Hollywood last year—$12.5 million.
Robbie has an estimated net worth of $60 million, which includes earnings from movies he starred in and LuckyChap Entertainment, a production company he started with his friends and husband.
“There’s only so much you can do as an actor,” Robbie said Marie Claire Australia in 2023. “As a producer you get to be a part of the conversations about who’s being hired and what the roles are and how much they’re getting paid.”
