Not even Infernos’ biggest fans could describe the nightclub as fashionable. Instead, its appeal lies in cheesy, churned-out pop anthems and the Gen Z-friendly drinks deals on offer. It is a venue where the floors are sticky and scantily clad queues to enter snake down the pavement outside.
Twice Oscar-nominated Hollywood stars worth an estimated £30 million, who count Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling among their co-stars and have their own critically acclaimed production companies, are usually conspicuous by their absence.
Yet the Clapham nightspot appears to be the only one Margot Robbie, 33 — star and producer of the soon-to-be-released movie Barbie and currently the most successful actress on the planet — has ever endorsed, for reasons that are both entirely on-brand to the haunt and in line with her own resolutely unstarry lifestyle.
‘Everyone is wasted and so sweaty. Everyone looks a mess,’ she explained. ‘By the time I make it to Infernos, I look so revolting no one’s going to look twice.’
Unlikely as it may sound for a woman whose home is now a £2.1 million Los Angeles mansion and who is feted by the world’s finest fashion designers, Robbie was until 2016 a resident of Clapham, South London, living with six friends in a ramshackle, four-bedroom flat ironically dubbed The Manor.
Margot Robbie was until 2016 a resident of Clapham, South London, living with six friends in a ramshackle, four-bedroom flat ironically dubbed The Manor
Infernos Nightclub in Clapham appears to be the only one Robbie, 33, has ever endorsed, for reasons that are both entirely on-brand to the haunt and in line with her own resolutely unstarry lifestyle.
Robbie is the star and producer of the soon-to-be-released movie Barbie and currently the most successful actress on the planet
Although already a household name, thanks to her starring role alongside Leonardo Di Caprio in the 2013 Hollywood blockbuster The Wolf Of Wall Street, Robbie favoured a ‘student life’, swilling pints and enjoying picnics on Clapham Common.
‘Those were the best days of my life,’ she has said. ‘For me, where you live and what you do have to be simplistic and comfortable, otherwise how are you possibly going to relax?
‘Clapham has always felt unassuming in the sense you’re just left alone to get on with who you are, and that’s perfect for me.’
Even after upping sticks to Los Angeles in 2017, where she now lives with her British producer husband Tom Ackerley, 33, she has maintained a determinedly low-brow, Anglophile existence.
A Harry Potter fanatic, she revealed in January she still keeps two Oyster cards in her wallet to travel the London Underground — ‘I always get the Tube’ — and she adores the ITV reality show Love Island.
Indeed, she seemed as pleased to see the show’s decidedly less famous former contestants Ekin-Su Culculoglu, Davide Sanclimenti, Liberty Poole and Danica Taylor, at Barbie’s London premiere this week as they were to see her, and proudly declared: ‘I seem to love a lot of British things. I love Harry Potter, I love my husband and I love Love Island.’
But how on earth did Robbie come to be living in a Clapham house share in the first place? And what does her decision to decamp to this South London neighbourhood say about one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars?
Robbie said: ‘Clapham has always felt unassuming in the sense you’re just left alone to get on with who you are, and that’s perfect for me’
The third of four siblings whose parents divorced when she was five, Robbie was raised by her mother, Sarie, a physiotherapist, on Australia’s Gold Coast.
As a child, she was fiercely independent, insisting on making her own lunch.
‘If I wanted something a certain way, I just did it myself,’ she says. Describing herself as a ‘business-savvy’ girl, when she wasn’t boar-hunting or surfing, Margot would steal her brother’s toys and sell them at the side of the road.
‘I grew up learning more about agriculture and animal husbandry than you could imagine,’ said Robbie, who was obsessed with films from a young age but said hers ‘was not the kind of upbringing you could ever have expected would lead anyone into acting’.
Having acquired a staunch work ethic from her ‘amazing’ Scottish-born mother, whose mortgage Margot paid off as soon as she found fame, she had worked as a cleaner, a Subway sandwich-maker and a sales assistant in a surf store by the time she was 16.
Not long after, ‘ambition’ propelled her to Melbourne to sleep on sofas as she forged an acting career.
She was on a snowboarding holiday in Canada ‘in a van with no doors’ when, in 2008, she landed the role of Donna Freedman on Neighbours, the Australian soap she’s described as ‘a rite of passage’ having already launched the careers of Kylie Minogue, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce.
‘I owe so much to Neighbours,’ Robbie has said. ‘It wasn’t just about giving me a break either. It gave me a real chance to work on my craft. It was the perfect training for Hollywood, and I will always be eternally grateful.’
So much so that she filmed a cameo role from Los Angeles for the soap’s finale when it was axed from Channel 5 after 37 years last summer, and sent 37 bottles of champagne to the Melbourne set to mark ‘the end of an era’.
Robbie is estimated £25 million, it’s remit is to ‘make female stories’, producing I, Tonya in 2017, Promising Young Woman, staring Carey Mulligan, in 2020 — both of which won Oscars — and now Barbie
After three years on the soap, Margot moved to America in 2011, where she played a flight attendant on a short-lived TV series called Pan Am, before landing her breakthrough role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street, a biography of disgraced banker Jordan Belfort, played by Di Caprio.
Margot was offered the part of Belfort’s wife, Naomi, after an unscripted slap to Di Caprio’s cheek during her audition.
It was playing a supporting role in the World War II movie Suite Francaise that she met her future husband, Ackerley, who was its assistant director, in 2014.
Margot, Ackerley and five others in the London-based film crew bonded so well that they decided to move in together.
‘We were like: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we all lived together?’ Margot later said. ‘Someone said: ‘But you don’t live in London,’ and I said: ‘I don’t live anywhere. I’ll move.’
So she did, signing the lease on a property chosen to be affordable to even the lowest paid crew member three days later, before dashing to the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, where The Wolf Of Wall Street had been nominated.
On the cusp of global stardom, laying down roots with friends removed from the excesses of Hollywood seemed like a smart move. Their camaraderie was such that Margot reportedly instigated a compulsory ‘house tattoo’, with every member getting the same design.
A friend who used to attend parties at the Clapham property said the house-mates liked to play drinking games and got through a lot of beer — which he remembers being plentiful in an otherwise empty fridge.
They’d go to Infernos and then nurse their hangovers the next day on Clapham Common.
Pictures posted of the group on social media in 2014 suggest a hard-drinking lifestyle a world away from the fakery of LA.
One, captioned ‘the house degenerates’, shows a brunette Margot wearing black boots, posing with her housemates atop a roof, sticking two fingers up at the camera, wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Oscars Bait’ (in 2018 Margot would be nominated for an Academy Award for her role in I, Tonya about infamous ice skater Tonya Harding).
Another shows a pile of bin bags outside the house filled with empty beer cans.
‘I was like a naughty schoolgirl,’ Robbie said of this time. ‘It was my first time living in London and I wanted to try every pub.’
She’s also pictured at Clapham’s SW4 electronic dance festival, barely recognisable in a throng of revellers in fancy head wear, and sitting astride a friend’s shoulders on what’s described as a ‘family night out’ to the London Eye.
There’s a fancy dress photo for Halloween, her distaste for ostentatiousness obvious.
‘It seems crazy to spend a huge amount of money on things you don’t need,’ she said then.
‘If I were a waitress, I’d probably have the exact same lifestyle. I’d go to the same clubs I go to already, live with the same housemates, hang out with the same people. I’m pretty frugal.’
Robbie and Ackerley left their house share for their own home in West London before moving to Los Angeles in 2017
When she did mix with celebrities, she sometimes got confused, recalling an occasion when she spent 30 minutes talking to Prince Harry at model Suki Waterhouse’s party: ‘I didn’t even know who he was . . . I thought I was hanging out with Ed Sheeran.’
Her bohemian reputation preceded her in the film industry, as Alexander Skarsgard, her co-star in adventure film The Legend Of Tarzan revealed: ‘She was living in a house with six other people, kind of a frat-house vibe, and on weekends she’d go to Amsterdam and sleep in bunk beds in a youth hostel, or to some music festival in northern England and sleep in a tent. She’s not precious at all.’
The housemates got on so well that in 2015, four of them — Robbie, Ackerley, Sophia Kerr and Josey McNamara — founded production company, Lucky Chap. Now worth an estimated £25 million, it’s remit is to ‘make female stories’, producing I, Tonya in 2017, Promising Young Woman, staring Carey Mulligan, in 2020 — both of which won Oscars — and now Barbie.
Working together brought Robbie and Ackerley — the Guildford-born son of an estate agent and, Margot once said, ‘the best looking man in London’ — closer — but they concealed the romance from flatmates at first.
‘We kept it a secret, because we weren’t really taking it seriously: ‘Oh, whatever, we’re just mates.’ And then everyone found out,’ she said, adding: ‘Our house turned into The Jerry Springer Show for a moment. Everyone was, like: ‘No! This is going to ruin our group!’ But the dust settled, and it was all good.’
Yet even though friends knew, the rest of the world didn’t. There was no engagement announcement and no suggestion they were set to marry at all until Margot was pictured at Gold Coast airport in December 2016 wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Say ‘I Do’ Down Under.’
Her fancy-dress hen do, held at a friend’s house in Australia, was attended by 45 women, including 16 school friends known as ‘The Heckers’ and was ‘absolute carnage’, said Robbie, not least because her Clapham friends flew out for the bash: ‘They are a rowdy bunch, too, and the combination was explosive.’
Her friends hired a Harry Potter-themed stripper — ‘he had all the Harry Potter phrases and innuendoes. I was so touched; it was really such a thoughtful thing to do. They know me so well.’
The wedding was held in Byron Bay and Margot’s mother gave her away. Robbie described the nuptials as ‘lovely, just chilled, you didn’t have to wear shoes’.
The couple skipped a honeymoon to work on I, Tonya: ‘There were times we were sitting in a car parked in Atlanta freezing cold, being like: ‘We should be on a beach — we should be on a honeymoon. What are we doing?!’ Following our dream,’ she said, adding that married life ‘is actually the most fun ever’ and that ‘I have a responsibility being someone’s wife, I want to be better’.
She and Ackerley left their house share for their own home in West London before moving to Los Angeles in 2017.
Films such as Bombshell, in 2019, co-starring Nicole Kidman, and Babylon with Brad Pitt in 2022, have consolidated Margot’s status, while her sanity in the entertainment world’s epicentre comes courtesy of her beloved Harry Potter books: ‘Reading Harry Potter makes me happy and calms me. I read for about an hour to two hours every night. My husband hates it.’
Her long-standing penchant for Love Island, which she described as ‘literally the most addictive thing on TV and said reminds her ‘of living in London — watching it with my girlfriends’, has also remained.
On her 31st birthday in July 2021, she hosted a Love Island-themed party, for which she wore a pink bikini and Perspex heels, and turned her house into the Casa Amor villa, replete with bucking bronco and heart-shaped ice sculpture.
Whatever the future holds for Margot it seems likely she’ll keep those Love Island-inspired stilettoes on the ground, her motto, whatever life throws at her, being: ‘Someone’s going to do it, so it might as well be you.’
Additional reporting: Giulia Crouch
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