Top 13 Margot Robbie Movies, Ranked

What happens when an actor refuses to play it safe? You get a career like Margot Robbie’s: a string of choices so bold and so varied that it’s almost hard to believe they belong to the same person. At TV Hulk, we ranked these performances by how completely she disappears into each role — how convincing, how emotionally alive, and how long the performance sticks with you after the credits roll. From a fictional Fox News assistant to the most famous doll in the world, Robbie has a habit of walking into films and making them entirely her own.

13. The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

Jane Clayton is a character with plenty of potential, and Robbie brings her usual spark to every scene she’s actually given room to breathe in. The problem is the script keeps sidelining her, turning Jane into someone who reacts to events rather than drives them. There’s a moment early on where she squares off against Christoph Waltz’s villain with real fire, and you can see exactly the version of this movie that could have existed. Robbie commits fully, and her physicality and line delivery are sharp throughout, but she’s working against material that consistently underserves her. Even so, it’s an entertaining enough blockbuster, and she’s never less than watchable.

12. Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017)

Daphne Milne could easily have been written off as a cold, unsympathetic mother, but Robbie finds the buried grief underneath all that brittleness. There’s a scene where Daphne returns home to find her son has become a national celebrity in her absence, and the mix of guilt and defensiveness Robbie plays in that moment is more layered than anything the film’s script explicitly asks for. The movie itself struggled to find an audience, which is a shame, because her work here is a reminder that she consistently pulls more out of middling material than it probably deserves. Daphne is a difficult woman to like, and Robbie makes sure she’s impossible to dismiss.

11. About Time (2013)

Charlotte is a small role in Richard Curtis’s warm, wistful time-travel romance, but Robbie makes her presence felt immediately. In her first few scenes, she radiates the kind of effortless magnetism that makes you understand exactly why the film’s protagonist can’t stop thinking about her. There’s a lightness to the performance, a breezy confidence that feels completely natural rather than performed. Charlotte doesn’t get much to do beyond being captivating, but watch the way Robbie holds a beat just a half-second longer than expected in her goodbye scene — that tiny pause does more emotional work than most actors manage with a full monologue, and it’s the detail that makes the whole performance land.

10. Z for Zachariah (2015)

Ann Burden carries almost every frame of this quiet, unsettling post-apocalyptic drama, and Robbie holds the weight without ever making it look like effort. The film drops Ann into a tense three-way dynamic with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Chris Pine, and what’s striking is how much Robbie communicates through stillness: the way Ann watches the two men size each other up, the careful way she chooses her words when the situation starts to curdle. There’s a scene near the end where Ann makes a decision that reframes everything we’ve seen, and Robbie plays it with a moral ambiguity that lingers. This is the film on the list that deserves a much bigger audience than it ever found.

9. Focus (2015)

Jess Barrett is introduced as a mark and quickly reveals herself to be something far more interesting, and Robbie tracks that shift with a confidence that makes the film’s best scenes crackle. The Buenos Aires betting sequence, where she and Will Smith go back and forth in an escalating game of psychological one-upmanship, is the film’s highlight, and she more than holds her own against a seasoned performer in full charm-offensive mode. Focus is a slick but fairly disposable con-caper, and the script doesn’t always give Jess the depth she deserves. But Robbie makes her feel like a fully realized operator with her own agenda, which is a real achievement given what she had to work with.

8. Mary Queen of Scots (2018)

Elizabeth I barely appears in Mary Queen of Scots by screen-time count, but Robbie’s performance is so precisely calibrated that the character looms over the entire film. She’s buried under layers of white makeup and prosthetics, and she uses that physical transformation to communicate something quietly devastating: a woman who has armored herself so completely against vulnerability that she’s become almost unrecognizable as human. The film’s climactic confrontation between Elizabeth and Saoirse Ronan’s Mary is a scene that shouldn’t work on paper — it’s historically invented — but Robbie makes it land on the specific moment when Elizabeth’s composure finally cracks, her voice dropping to something barely above a whisper, and you realize the armor has been the performance all along.

7. Babylon (2022)

Nellie LaRoy arrives on screen at full volume and never really comes down, and that’s entirely the point. Robbie plays her as someone who was born performing, a woman whose entire identity is wrapped up in being seen, and the tragedy of Babylon is watching that hunger slowly consume her. The film’s opening party sequence is a sensory overload, and Robbie is its chaotic, irresistible center: dancing, screaming, negotiating her way onto a film set through sheer force of will. Most audiences missed it in theaters, which is a genuine shame, because Robbie’s work here deserves to be seen big. Watch the moment she freezes mid-laugh when she realizes the silent era is ending — her face does something complicated and completely unscripted-feeling that lands harder than any of the film’s louder moments.

6. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Sharon Tate doesn’t have many lines in Quentin Tarantino’s sun-drenched Hollywood elegy, and that’s what makes Robbie’s performance so quietly extraordinary. She plays Sharon as pure, uncomplicated joy: there’s a scene where she slips into a movie theater to watch herself on screen, and the delight on her face, private, unguarded, completely real, is one of the most affecting moments in the whole film. Everything about who Sharon was comes through in body language and expression alone, and the film’s elegiac undertone lands with real emotional weight because of it. Doing that much with that little dialogue is no small feat, and Robbie does it beautifully.

5. Harley Quinn Franchise (2016–2021)

Across Suicide Squad (2016), Birds of Prey (2020), and The Suicide Squad (2021), Robbie built a live-action version of Harley Quinn so fully realized that it’s now hard to imagine anyone else in the role. The 2016 film gave her the character’s foundations, the manic energy, the dangerous unpredictability, the flashes of genuine hurt underneath the chaos, but Birds of Prey is where Harley really came into her own. That film is built entirely around her, and Robbie runs with it: the police evidence room fight sequence is a perfect showcase for how she blends physical comedy with genuine menace. By The Suicide Squad, the darkly comedic timing had been refined to something close to perfect, and the character felt like a fully inhabited person rather than a comic-book archetype.

4. Bombshell (2019)

Kayla Pospisil is the only character in Bombshell who didn’t actually exist, which makes what Robbie does with her even more impressive. Surrounded by Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman playing real, recognizable public figures, she had to create someone entirely from scratch and render her just as grounded and specific. The harassment scene with John Lithgow’s Roger Ailes is almost unbearable to watch. Robbie plays Kayla’s confusion, shame, and desperate self-rationalization in real time, without a single moment of melodrama, and it’s the emotional gut-punch the entire film builds toward. Kayla is the character who makes Bombshell matter, and the performance more than earns the critical acclaim Robbie received for the role.

3. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Naomi Lapaglia is not the film’s protagonist, but Robbie refuses to let that stop her. Walking into a three-hour Martin Scorsese excess machine packed with career-best work from Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, she was a relative unknown, and she matched them scene for scene. The bedroom confrontation where Naomi lays out exactly what Jordan Belfort is and what he’s thrown away is the film’s most electrifying two minutes: Robbie plays it with a cold fury that cuts right through all the noise and spectacle. It’s the scene that put her name on every Hollywood shortlist overnight, and watching it now, the reaction makes complete sense. Naomi could have been a trophy wife in lesser hands. Robbie made her the sharpest person in the room.

2. I, Tonya (2017)

Tonya Harding spent years as a tabloid punchline, and Robbie spent I, Tonya systematically dismantling that caricature. She plays Tonya from teenager to disgraced adult, and the physical transformation is the least of it: what’s remarkable is how she tracks the accumulation of damage across Tonya’s life, the way years of being dismissed and abused harden into a defiant, self-destructive pride you completely understand even when it’s working against her. The skating sequences required months of training, and Robbie did as much of it herself as possible, and that commitment shows in every frame. She also produced the film, and that control over the project is probably why it resists turning Tonya into either a villain or a victim, letting the contradictions breathe instead. The performance is bigger than any single award, and it remains the most complete work she’s ever put on screen.

1. Barbie (2023)

There is a moment in Barbie where Robbie’s Barbie, sitting on a bus in the real world, watches an elderly woman with such unguarded wonder that the entire film’s emotional argument clicks into place. It’s a tiny moment in a massive cultural phenomenon, and exactly the kind of thing that separates a good performance from an unforgettable one. Robbie carries the film’s wild tonal range: the slapstick physicality of Barbieland, the fish-out-of-water comedy of the real world, and the existential crisis at its core. Each register lands with real emotional weight, and she never lets one overwhelm the others. The pink wave that swept through 2023 had Robbie at its center, and she earned every bit of it. That Barbie works as comedy, cultural conversation, and emotional experience is largely because of what she brought to the role.

Margot Robbie’s movie career has been defined by an almost aggressive refusal to repeat herself, and this list is the evidence. Before any of it, she spent several years on the Australian soap Neighbours, playing Donna Freedman across hundreds of episodes, a grounding in character work that probably explains why she’s so comfortable disappearing into roles that have nothing in common with each other. The through-line isn’t a type. It’s a standard.