Barbie's Rollerblades Had Margot Robbie And Ryan Gosling Struggling In Very Different Ways
Barbie and Ken's rollerblades were a defining part of the "Barbie" movie, but they also presented huge challenges for the star-studded cast. The 2023 summer blockbuster is filled to the brim with unforgettable moments, but perhaps the most memorable is when Barbie and Ken enter the real world for the very first time on a set of bespoke neon skates. It's a difficult reckoning for the dolls when the real world makes a spectacle of them, and the two actors had a similar experience filming the scene. But it wasn't just the rugged reality of Venice Beach that made the shoot so difficult — it was the rollerblades themselves.
Now, the film's producer and star Margot Robbie has experience on a set of skates. She started rollerskating in her free time while shooting the biopic "I, Tonya," the actress revealed to Vogue. Her character Tonya Harding is an Olympian figure skater, so Robbie took her concrete skating very seriously — she even got her own pair and removed the brakes. "I never had them on ice skates," she explained, "so it would mess me up."
Despite being at ease on a pair of rollerblades, the word "rollerblades" was not at ease on Robbie's tongue. The Australian-born actress struggled to form her mouth around a word with so many Rs, which are not pronounced in her native accent. Barbie, on the other hand, is from Everytown, U.S.A., and therefore speaks in a "General American accent," Robbie added. "It's called GenAm."
"Rollerblades is really hard to say in the American accent," she confessed to BBC Radio 1. Unfortunately for her, it was far from the only tongue-twister in a very verbose script.
Robbie struggled with the pronunciation
As the co-writer and director, Greta Gerwig had a lot of ideas about the dialogue in "Barbie" that weren't limited to the pages of the script. The "Frances Ha" star was also very concerned with the pacing of speech in the film. She was heavily inspired by "His Girl Friday," an Old Hollywood classic characterized by incredibly rapid speech and overlapping dialogue, as Robbie attested to Entertainment Weekly.
"Greta, she really listens to the rhythm of dialogue and she wanted this kind of, you know, quick pace," the "Suicide Squad" actress said in her BBC Radio 1 interview. "And there was some lines where I'm like, 'I know I'm stereotypical Barbie, I'm not meant to form conjectures based on the causality of adjacent unfolding events....' blah blah blah blah. Like, you know, stuff like that where I was like, 'Ah, okay, that's a mouthful.'"
Rollerblades weren't the only wardrobe-related word that made Robbie malfunction. The Ken to her Barbie, Ryan Gosling, is a Canadian-born actor who has worked in Hollywood for decades, but even he struggled to pronounce some of Barbie's alliterative archival outfits — despite looking right at home in Ken's iconic disco jumpsuit.
"There was also a string of Barbie clothes that was really hard, like 'Pajama Jam In Amsterdam Set,'" he added, "'Pretty Paisley Palazzo Pants.' Try that one." These pants were so difficult to pronounce that Robbie joked about making it an "accent warmup." She and Gerwig referred to these tricky lines as "word salad."
Robbie has had a much easier time with regional accents, like Harley Quinn's Brooklyn accent or Naomi's Long Island accent in "The Wolf of Wall Street." "It's a really fun accent to do, and it's actually easier to do coming from an Australian accent than a standard American accent because there are no Rs," the actress said on Good Morning America.
Gosling didn't know how to rollerblade
Saying "rollerblades" was no problem for a seasoned actor like Gosling, but using them was a different story. "It was hard for me because I don't know how to rollerblade, and somehow I thought I would know when we shot it," he admitted in an interview with CapitalFM. "Margot was so disappointed. She's such a great skater."
Robbie was far from disappointed, though — the actress was happy to excel at a skill that her multi-talented co-star didn't already have in his back pocket. Gosling has been singing and dancing since his days on the "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" set and more recently flexed his musical muscles in "La La Land." Although she knocked her own dance number out of the park, Robbie was less experienced in this area. Rollerblading, on the other hand, was her time to shine. "Ryan can do literally anything, including rollerblading," she chimed in, correcting her co-star. "It was just the one and only thing that I was slightly better at."
But despite being a seasoned pro on skates, rollerblading in Venice Beach was a brutal scene for Robbie to shoot as well. Much like her character, the star was forced to grapple with self-consciousness in her Barbiedom for the very first time.
"We'd been in the bubble of Barbieland shooting here in London at Leavesden Studios," she explained to BBC Radio 1. "It was our first foray into the real world, as it was for Barbie and Ken as well, so it was very fitting." Ken has an easier time adjusting to the public eye, but Gosling does not. "Margot and Greta [Gerwig] had created such a safe and creative environment that you could really try and do anything, and then suddenly you stepped out and you Ken in public, it's a rude awakening," he added.
In the rollerblading scene, life imitated art
The stars of "Barbie" said that the scene where they rollerblade down Venice Beach was the most difficult to shoot, per CapitalFM, and it wasn't an easy scene for their characters either. In fact, Gerwig was surprised at how much the experience of filming the scene mirrored Barbie and Ken's experience in the movie. After being sheltered by the made-up world of the Barbieland set, the neon-clad actors were thrust under the harsh lens of public perception. The gritty boardwalk clashed with the plastic, manicured world where Barbie hails as well as the welcoming and insular environment of the London-based set. Even the way that Robbie and Gosling were received differently matched the gender bias that was highlighted in the movie, Gerwig told Rolling Stone:
"People would go by Ryan, high-five him, and say, 'Awesome, Ryan, you look great!' And they wouldn't actually say anything to Margot. They'd just look at her. It was just surreal. In that moment, she did feel self-conscious. And as the director, I wanted to protect her. But I also knew that the scene we were shooting had to be the scene where she felt exposed. And she was exposed, both as a celebrity and as a lady. To be fair, Ryan was like, 'I wish I wasn't wearing this vest.' But it was a different kind of discomfort."
The hard launch was hard for Robbie and Gosling
Both in real life and the world of "Barbie," rollerblades transported these actors into the harsh light of the real world. The word, the skating, and the scene itself took them to a place of discomfort and novelty. Robbie was comfortable on skates but uncomfortable saying the word. She was happy to be Barbie in Barbieland, but found that taking Barbie out into the world brought a new level of self-consciousness. Just like Barbie, she was forced to grapple with new feelings of embarrassment and self-awareness she had been sheltered from while making the film.
Gosling may not have struggled with pronouncing the word, but he also had difficulty shooting the scene. The public eye might have been kinder to him, but he was also scared of how his neon outfit made him stand out. His Kenergy was being called into question for the first time by the outside world. In the real world of the film, too, Ken is both praised and ridiculed by beach-going passersby. He was not just new to this kind of outfit-based spectacle — especially while in character — he was also new to rollerskating. By becoming Bambi in bespoke rollerskates, the actor had his own fish-out-of-water experience, just like Ken.
Robbie and Gosling are some of the best actors working in Hollywood today. They may not have needed the experience of shooting this scene to channel the emotions that their characters were feeling in that moment, but it certainly didn't hurt. This "hard launch," as Robbie aptly called it to CapitalFM, was just what they needed.