“I was like, ‘Mom, don’t even worry about that mortgage anymore. It doesn’t even exist anymore,’ ” the actress said
Margot Robbie jumped at the chance to pay back her mom for supporting her movie-star dreams.
The Australian Barbie actress/producer, who got her start on the soap Neighbours before breaking into Hollywood with 2013’s Wolf of Wall Street, recalled on CBS Sunday Morning how she paid back her mom Sarie Kessler when she hit it big.
“Everything I owed my mom, I had it written down. She’d take money out of the, like, house mortgage [to] lend me money. So I always knew, I was like, ‘I gotta pay that back,’ ” said Robbie, 33. “And then one day, when I made enough money, I just paid that whole mortgage off completely.”
“I was like, ‘Mom, don’t even worry about that mortgage anymore. It doesn’t even exist anymore,’ ” she added.
“Honestly,” said Robbie, “anyone in my position, you’d do that for your mom. Of course you would.”
The two-time Oscar nominee said she is “so grateful” and “lucky” to be where she is in her career.
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Doug Robbie, Sarie Kessler, Margot Robbie, and Tom Ackerly attend The European Premiere Of “Barbie” at Cineworld Leicester Square
“I know I’m hardworking and blah, blah, blah, but I’m also the luckiest, luckiest, luckiest person in the world,” she said. “Every time that I did something I was like, ‘Now it’s the top. It will never get better than this.’ And then somehow it’s just kept getting better and better.”
For a 2019 Vogue Australia interview, Robbie and her mom recalled family memories. Kessler remembered the time her daughter told her she wanted to be an actress.
Margot Robbie (left) and Mother Sarie Kessler arriving at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party
“I really admired the way you set about deciding how your future was going to unfold. I remember the first time you told me you were going to be an actor in grade 12,” she said.
“Do you remember doing that movie? You loved it so much and you came home and said: ‘Mum, you’re not going to like this, but I’ve decided I’m going to be an actor,’ ” continued Kessler.
“And Margot, my jaw hit the floor because you were at a really good school. You come from a family with a medical background and a family with a business background, and you told me you were going to be an actor. I was stunned.”
Kessler recalled worrying it would be “hard to be an actor and make a good living.”
She also mentioned that “being in a big family too — with two brothers and a sister and yourself — we had to figure things out and work through the difficulties of having tight budgets” while Robbie pursued the career.
“I was very concerned you were intending to take a pathway that, to me, didn’t have a really extensive future,” Robbie’s mother said. “And now you could say: ‘Mum, you needed more faith in what I can achieve.’ I’m just absolutely so happy for you that you’re in a situation where you love what you do and you have the independence to do what you do because you guys started up your own company [LuckyChap Entertainment].”