Did Margot Robbie Really Have a Secret Letterboxd Account? An Investigation
Margot Robbie has never had a big presence on social media, posting on Instagram only sparingly before deactivating her account last year. Imagine her fans’ delight, then, when they managed to track down what they believed to be the 31-year-old actor and producer on Letterboxd, a site where users connect over their taste in cinema and rate and discuss films. Her alleged account didn’t share insight into what Robbie’s been streaming, which appeared to include M*A*S*H, Sweeney Todd, and The Italian Job. It also seemed to reveal more about two of Robbie’s most highly anticipated (and mysterious) projects, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon.
But is MaggieAckerley really Robbie, who has maintained enough privacy that you may not have known she has been married to the British filmmaker Thomas Ackerley for eight years? You can’t believe everything you see on the internet, as we all should know by now.
It tracks that she wouldn’t use her real first name, and Maggie seems like a logical choice; “I got called Maggie, Margz, Mags, Maggles,” she told the Guardian of her childhood nicknames in 2018. And apparently, the only film she rated (with five stars) was Deliverance, which Robbie mentioned to Vogue last year: “I’m really interested in the whole alpha male dynamic, and I’m going to sound like an absolute lunatic right now, but it’s like Deliverance, that pack mentality.” Of course, the fact that Robbie has talked about these things means it would be easy for a super fan to attempt to impersonate her.
You’ll have to look at the screenshots being shared on Twitter to find further evidence, because as of Tuesday, the account (which seems to have been created in 2020) no longer exists. And that sure seems to be suspicious; if someone took the time to impersonate Robbie, why would they suddenly stop when they’re just starting to get attention for doing so? Alas, on Tuesday night, Letterboxd mostly debunked the theory, but not entirely: “Margot Robbie does not officially have a Letterboxd that we know of,” the site posted on Twitter.
Maybe MaggieAckerley is Robbie, and maybe MaggieAckerley isn’t. In any case, its Babylon- and Barbie-related listings serve as a good solution for tiding you over until the films’ respective December 25 and July 21, 2023 releases. The first offers a primer on Clara Bow, the silent film star that Robbie will play opposite Brad Pitt, and the second is comprised of a roster that’s taken the already high anticipation for the film—which seems to star everyone in Hollywood, from Will Ferrell to Issa Rae to Ryan Gosling as Ken—to new heights. (As of now, we pretty much only know the official synopsis: “a doll living in ‘Barbieland’ is expelled for not being perfect enough and sets off on an adventure in the real world.” There’s Puberty Blues (1987), about two teens trying to fit in with their popular peers. (It happens to be Australian, just like Robbie.) There’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, starring Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo as two star-crossed lovers, which we assume Barbie and Ken will also be if the former is expelled from Barbieland. And most exciting of all, there’s The Truman Show (1998), which centers on a man played by Jim Carrey who’s unknowingly the star of a 24-hour TV show about his every move.
The idyllic and yet dystopian set where The Truman Show takes place sure seems like the perfect inspiration for Gerwig’s Barbieland. Robbie may look like the classic Barbie in the photo that recently served as our first look at the film, but it seems all but guaranteed that Gerwig has an unconventional take on the Mattel universe in store. For now, though, details of the plot remain a mystery—just like whether or not Maggie Ackerley really is Robbie.
