Vanity Fair’s Profile of Margot Robbie Slammed as ‘Creepy and Lecherous’

A new profile of Margot Robbie in Vanity Fair magazine has been branded “creepy and lecherous” because of its portrait of the Australian actress.

Writer Rich Cohen, who is also a co-creator of the now-axed Martin Scorsese HBO series Vinyl, has also come under heavy criticism for referring to Australians as “throwback people” in the article.

Later, he somewhat reductively describes Robbie as “one of Scorsese’s women,” following her role in The Wolf of Wall Street.

The piece, titled “Welcome to the Summer of Margot Robbie,” appears in the August issue of the magazine and has been published to coincide with her new movies The Legend of Tarzan and Suicide Squad, and now Twitter is ablaze with people calling out Cohen on its tone.

He writes in the piece:

“She is 26 and beautiful, not in that otherworldly, catwalk way but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance.”

“She is blonde but dark at the roots. She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes. She can be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character.”

“She wandered through the room like a second-semester freshman, finally at ease with the system. She stopped at tables along the way to talk to friends. I don’t remember what she was wearing, but it was simple, her hair combed around those painfully blue eyes.”

Many — including other journalists and writers — have taken to Twitter to express their views on the article, the majority being unflinchingly scathing.

And then there’s what he says about Australia, portraying the Gold Coast in Queensland as an out-there backwater rather than a major city and tourist hot spot with a population of well over 500,000.

“In an old movie, you might have seen a crossroad sign demonstrating just how isolated it was, just how far from the known capitals,” he says.

“Now and then, she stayed with cousins who lived in the hinterland of the hinterland, where there really were kangaroos and a dingo really will eat your baby.”

“Australia is America 50 years ago, sunny and slow, a throwback, which is why you go there for throwback people,” he writes, adding that Australians “still live and die with the plot turns of soap operas.”

He was, as you might expect, called out on this as well.

The article ends with Robbie just getting up and leaving.

So far, Cohen appears to be keeping his head down on Twitter.

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