The Making of ‘Barbie’: Margot Robbie Says the Film’s Last Line Is “The Hill I Was Ready to Die On”

In the beginning — 1959, to be exact — there was Barbie. Neither formless nor vapid, she came to the toy-playing masses with high heels and high breasts, an apparition of mock adulthood. Her creator, Ruth Handler, gave her the grown-up persona she noticed little girls transferred onto baby dolls, and a name that would honor her own daughter, Barbara. 

Then, in 2018, there was Margot Robbie. The actress, who was building the portfolio of her nascent production company, LuckyChap, saw — in the doll and the brand — an opportunity. She had been tracking the attempts to create a film out of the long-standing IP, and Sony’s option had just expired, moving the rights to Warner Bros. Robbie and her partners (including husband Tom Ackerley) asked for a meeting with Mattel, eager to convince its executives to anoint them as the team to finally bring Barbie to the big screen. 

“I don’t know what gave Mattel the confidence to say yes to us, but I do know we entered that meeting with a lot of respect for the brand and its legacy, and with the intention to make a comedy without making fun,” Robbie says. “We wanted to point out the difficult truths in a thoughtful way. The movie couldn’t just be propaganda.”

Navigating this dichotomy required a very special leader. Robbie had recently met Greta Gerwig on the 2017-18 awards circuit, when they were promoting I, Tonya and Lady Bird, respectively (each was nominated for an Oscar). “I knew we’d have to find someone brave enough to address certain topics and have hard conversations, but who was going to make it feel fun,” she says. “That’s why we needed Greta.” 

Gerwig, for her part, sees Barbie like the mythical Athena; sprung, fully formed, from Zeus’ head. (“Like, here she is!”) She felt the beginnings of a plot within that character dynamic, but came up against some hesitation. “I wanted Noah [Baumbach, her partner] to write it with me because we hadn’t written together in a while and I love writing with him. But his first reaction was, there is no character or story here,” she explains. “The doll is inherently something to project onto, meant to be interpreted by the person playing with her.”

They decided to do it anyway. The first thing Gerwig remembers writing is a conversation Barbie has about “mortality and death and illness and decay.” When she looks back at those early drafts, she sees the way all her interests made it into the script, which was written during the height of the pandemic. “At the time, we didn’t know if there would even be movies anymore,” she says. “When we turned it in, I was thrilled with it, but I thought, ‘They probably won’t let us make this, but maybe it will turn into some nice Hollywood lore about scripts that never came to be.’ ” 

The story they landed on, a hero’s journey that follows the titular doll as she starts to question her own reality in the Technicolor matriarchy that is Barbie Land (Gerwig’s fixations made themselves apparent with Barbie’s now-infamous question, “Do you guys ever think about dying?”) and journeys to the Real World for clarity, is silly, surreal and sentimental. It asks its audience how children play — and why adults stop playing. It also wonders, often, “Who is Ken?” (And why is he Kenning so hard?) To Gerwig, he’s like Eve, created out of Barbie, as an afterthought to Barbie, in a sort of gender-flipped Garden of Eden. “On the toy box it just said, ‘Ken is Barbie’s boyfriend,’ and I thought that was so odd,” she says with delight. “He has no references other than her.”

They found their Ken in Ryan Gosling, for all the obvious reasons. The actor brought his comedic timing, distinctive jawline and newly bleached blond hair (important!) to the role, but quickly discovered that the nostalgic film was awakening a bit of his inner child. Gosling’s first “real” job, at 8 years old, was performing at weddings — he says he would sing and dance for the bride during the garter ceremony — which, famously, led to gigs at local malls and then eventually The Mickey Mouse Club. Early in the process of putting Barbie together, he asked Gerwig if she would be open to Ken dancing. “That kid worked really hard to get me where I am today, and I thought I could let him retire,” he says. “It’s funny, because for a long time I was embarrassed of him, but what moved me most about this script is how it kind of encourages you to be a little kinder to your younger self. I felt I owed that kid one last dance.”

Barbie’s song-and-dance scenes became pivotal to both the film and its reception. The filmmakers hired Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, who won an Oscar for their work on 2018’s A Star Is Born, to compose the soundtrack. Ronson says the first time they read the script, inspired by the portrayal of Ken as a tragicomic figure, they immediately thought of the lyric “I’m just Ken/Anywhere else I’d be a 10.” They wrote the rest of the song before seeing a single frame of Gosling’s onscreen portrayal, but the production and arrangement of the final version were influenced by his performance. “We saw him coming in on that boat, with a white mink on, like some kind of Saving Private Ryan,” says Ronson, “and were like, ‘Wait, we need to make this feel like this character’s favorite song in the world.’ ” 

When Gosling first went into the recording booth, he wasn’t confident he’d be able to sing “I’m Just Ken.” Though he was in a band (called Dead Man’s Bones) for a long time and received an Oscar nomination for his role in the musical La La Land, he felt the song was out of his range and comfort zone. “I kept trying to lower the key, but Mark, in his infinite wisdom, kept pushing it back up,” he says. “Eventually I realized it wasn’t me singing the song, it was Ken. I felt like Ken rode in on his tiny horse and sang it with me.” The actor was also influential in the release of another track — Ken’s rendition of “Push” by Matchbox Twenty. Ronson and Wyatt never intended to include it in the film’s soundtrack album (it was meant to be exclusive to the film), but noticed during early screenings that the scene — in which Ken plays the guitar at Barbie for hours — was playing to huge laughs. They sent the version they had to Gosling for approval and he suggested they get into the studio to add production backing and organ drums. “What’s ironic about the way it’s used in the movie, as this sort of bro-y sentiment, is that Rob Thomas has said that he wrote the song about a relationship where he was pushed around by a partner,” says Ronson. “But I know Ryan has sent him many a complimentary message about the song, so I hope he knows how appreciative we are.” 

The first thing most people notice when they watch Barbie is the pink. Gerwig describes the vibe of the film as “gleeful anarchy,” and nowhere is that more apparent than the way it looks. For production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer, longtime collaborators who have worked on everything from the live-action Beauty and the Beast to Atonement, “cracking the pinks” was the very first step. Millennial pink (which they admit they had to look up) was out, and so was that 1980s version they felt leans pornographic. They settled on a palette of 12 hues, and built the pink-grain desk that sits in the Oval Office of Issa Rae’s presidential Barbie. “When you see it on your own, you think, ‘That’s never going to work,’ ” says Spencer. “But Greta never wavered — she said, ‘You have to stop your adult taste from coming in, you’ve got to use your inner child.’ ” 

The entirety of Barbie Land was built to scale at the Warner Bros. studio outside London (the broken-down set remains there, preserved in countless storage units). Greenwood, Spencer and their team used 1950s Technicolor musicals and dioramas (like what one might see at New York’s Museum of Natural History) as their inspiration. “You start with the Dream Houses, and then everything beyond that goes two-dimensional,” explains Greenwood of the set. “The palm trees in the background are flat, and then the mountains are smaller, though still 20 or 30 feet high, and then we have a painted sky — which was in fact 800 feet long and 50 feet high. When Margot and Ryan are taking the boat, we built the rolling waves and the dolphins; somebody’s back there literally turning the waves and making the dolphins move. When they’re on the bike, there’s a conveyor belt with tulips going by really fast. Nothing had to be created in post.” Spencer remembers that Gosling’s first formal shoot day was the scene in which Barbie and Ken take the boat as part of their journey to the Real World. “It was straight off the plane into this madcap world,” she says. “He completely got it. He was like, ‘I love this, can I have a seagull?’ ”

America Ferrera was so excited to see what it was like on set that she showed up well before the call sheet required. The Barbies and Kens were rehearsing the choreography to Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night,” and she wanted to be part of the bonding moment. “It’s also my deepest dream to be with a bunch of women, learning choreography together. I’m always looking to re-create that feeling of being in a basement at a sleepover,” she says. “My favorite day on set was the rehearsal they put on for Mark [Ronson] and Rodrigo [Prieto, the cinematographer]. There wasn’t a single camera rolling, except for Rodrigo figuring out future shots on his iPhone. We were doing it just for us. I looked at Greta and there were tears in her eyes.”

Ferrera’s first copy of the Barbie script included a note from Gerwig: “I wrote a Barbie movie, hear me out,” she remembers with a laugh. She was taken by the self-deprecation imbued in that — the title page said “Barbie,” with “And Ken” written and crossed out underneath, and Gerwig and Baumbach opened by acknowledging that the document was long, but they promised the dialogue would move quickly. 

“One of the most fun things was they wrote every actor’s name into it,” adds Ferrera. “It was like, Narrator/Voice of God: Helen Mirren. Ken: Ryan Gosling. It was so bold, declaring who they wanted and for which roles.” Robbie, for her part, admits that it worked: “I have to say, reading it as an actor, you can’t help but see yourself doing the role when your name is there — it’s a clever tool.”

After she agreed to play Gloria, the woman who helps Barbie overthrow the patriarchal Kendom, Ferrera and Gerwig began to shape the character’s pivotal third-act monologue about the impossibility of being a woman. It’s easy for viewers to assign the message — lines like “You have to be thin but not too thin and you can never say you want to be thin” — specifically to Ferrera or Gerwig alone, but they are adamant that it came from a wider brain trust. “That speech isn’t something I ‘gave’ to America, and I don’t feel as if it’s my declaration,” says Gerwig. “It belongs to America.” 

They spent months sharing poetry, TikToks and clips of congresswomen testifying. “We connected so much as mothers and artists, that by the time it was my turn to say the words, there was so much support beneath each line,” says Ferrera. “I also think we’re both doing that annoying thing that we don’t want other women to do, which is saying, ‘Oh no, it wasn’t me, it was all her.’ But it really was a collaboration.”

Robbie’s proudest moment of dialogue isn’t a speech, but the six words that end the film: “I’m here to see my gynecologist.” She picked more than a few battles in her role as producer, occasionally fielding discomfort or nerves from the studio and corporations involved in Barbie. “But the last line of the movie was the hill I was ready to die on,” she says. Robbie received feedback, though she won’t say from whom, that there was concern the line might spur young viewers to ask too many questions. “I said, ‘If that’s the only thing this movie accomplishes, then I will be so proud, because that might save that little girl’s life one day,’ ” says Robbie. “I think it’s extremely important that girls know, and if this movie makes them ask, then it will all have been worthwhile.” 

So many people have seen Barbie this year that the idea of only one single little girl learning about reproductive health feels like a mathematical impossibility. It’s the highest-grossing domestic release in Warner Bros. history, had the largest opening ever for a female director, and cemented Gerwig as the only woman to solo-direct a billion-dollar movie. Robbie refers to the cultural moment as Pink Fever and says that, though marketing brainstorms started before they even began principal photography, the trend of dressing up for screenings happened much more organically than predicted. 

Gerwig is still processing all this success, but finds she believes in herself, and her vision of creation, even more: “Now that I’ve done this, I have an expansion of faith in myself.” 

She said, “Let there be pink,” and there was pink — and we saw that the pink was good. 

This story first appeared in a December standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.