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For actress and producer Margot Robbie, the upcoming Barbie movie is a feminist tale, but Mattel executives don’t quite agree.
In a new Time magazine feature about the brand’s history and the film’s journey to the big screen, members of Barbie‘s creative team and leading executives at the toy manufacturer-turned-“IP company that is managing franchises,” according to Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz, open up about the more than a decade journey to getting the iconic doll into live-action. One of the biggest threads of that journey is a shared vision for an inclusive take on the toy brand, which has a storied and complicated history with representing the diversity of womanhood and women’s potential.
“I knew this was not going to shy away from the parts of Barbie that are more interesting but potentially a little bit more fraught,” actress Hari Nef, who plays Doctor Barbie, said. “The contemporary history of feminism and body positivity — there are questions of how Barbie can fit into all of that.”
It’s a complex vision that might not necessarily be feminist, depending on who you ask. Robbie Brenner, Mattel Films’ first-ever executive producer and “the architect of its cinematic universe,” according to Time, said that the Greta Gerwig-directed film (which she co-wrote with partner Noah Baumbach) was “not a feminist movie.” It was reportedly a “sentiment echoed by other Mattel executives,” according to reporter Eliana Dockterman, and one that seemed to catch caught Robbie off guard when broached.
“Who said that?” she reportedly asked, before expounding on, in her opinion, whether the film could be labeled feminist. “It’s not that it is, or it isn’t. It’s a movie. It’s a movie that’s got so much in it.”
What the producer and star said the movie surely is, is a story that “isn’t a Barbie puff piece” and is instead a tale where “we’re in on the joke.” Robbie’s comments somewhat echo those of Richard Dickson, COO and president of Mattel, who, while declining to discuss why a version of the film with Amy Schumer didn’t move forward, said producing Barbie “was a matter of finding the right talent that can appreciate the brand’s authenticity and bring that controversy to life in a way that, yes, pokes fun at us but ultimately is purposeful and has heart.”
Whether or not to call the film feminist is not the only disagreement the film’s creative team had with Mattel. Dickson confirmed to the magazine that he flew out to the London set while it was filming and argued with Gerwig and Robbie over one scene “he felt was off-brand,” according to Time. It wasn’t until after the two performed the scene that he changed his mind. “When you look on the page, the nuance isn’t there, the delivery isn’t there,” explains Robbie.
“In that very first meeting, we impressed upon Ynon we are going to honor the legacy of your brand, but if we don’t acknowledge certain things — if we don’t say it, someone else is going to say it,” Robbie added about how the film would tackle the brand’s history. “So you might as well be a part of that conversation.”
While there were and remain disagreements about the nature of the film, one part of the conversation the Barbie creative team and Mattel seemingly agreed on was its inclusive casting, which mirrors Mattel’s expansion of both its Barbie and Ken lines in the mid-2010s. The modernization effort added different skin tones, hair types and body sizes to the long-running toy brand for a total of 175 different Barbies, fully affirming one of brand’s long-running messages: that she and her buyers can be whatever they aspire to be.
So while Robbie is the film’s main “Barbie,” Dickson said that was to help those less in touch with the company’s more recent line expansions connect with the story. “All the characters are Barbie. It’s the perfect cast to express what Barbie is today. And Margot is the bridge,” he explained.
For Robbie, that line expansion was pivotal to her taking up the film. “If [Mattel] hadn’t made that change to have a multiplicity of Barbies, I don’t think I would have wanted to attempt to make a Barbie film,” she says. “I don’t think you should say, ‘This is the one version of what Barbie is, and that’s what women should aspire to be and look like and act like.’”
Comedian and actress Kate McKinnon, who plays Weird Barbie, said the film “comments honestly about the positive and negative feelings” associated with the Barbie brand for those who bought the doll, making it “an incisive cultural critique.”
For Issa Rae, who plays President Barbie, her “worry” was that the film “was going to feel too white feminist-y, but I think that it’s self-aware,” she told Time. “Barbie Land is perfect, right? It represents perfection. So if perfection is just a bunch of white Barbies, I don’t know that anybody can get on board with that.”
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