Wearing an eye-catching blue outfit, a very blond Margot Robbie sweeps into the room to enthusiastically embrace Alexander Skarsgard, her co-star in “The Legend of Tarzan,” opening today. She’s just returned from Hungary from shooting “Terminal,” a film her company is producing, and the two catch up on what they’ve been doing since they last saw each other.
In the new film, Skarsgard plays Tarzan and Robbie is Jane in the reimagining of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ story of Lord Greystoke, a British noble raised by apes in Africa. At nearly 6 feet 5 inches, the actor fits director David Yates’ vision of a “lean, long and tall” Tarzan.
The filmmaker of the final four “Harry Potter” films and upcoming “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” says when he was looking for actors to play Tarzan, “I got really stuck at the idea of someone who could bring something graceful and interesting to the role, and I kept coming back to Alex.”
After convincing the studios with a screen test, the 39-year-old actor went on a regimen to bulk up for the physical demands of the role. The first phase was four months of eating 7,000 calories a day and weight lifting. He put on about 24 pounds of muscle.
Jane is required to be physical, too, and Robbie, who studied the trapeze since she was 8, seemed like she had been preparing for it since she was a kid.
Skarsgard agrees, saying to his costar, “You certainly are more agile than I am. So you would’ve been a better Tarzan,” and then cracks, “I would’ve been a decent Jane, not to brag.”
“The height difference might make it look a little awkward,” jokes Robbie, who turns 26 on Saturday. At 5 foot 6 inches, the actress says she looks taller on film because of the height of some of her co-stars, though not her Tarzan. “They can’t even get us in a frame together,” she says, nodding toward Skarsgard, “because Alex is a meter above me.”
“I love Margot’s tomboy quality,” says director Yates, who didn’t know what to expect when he met her in London while promoting “The Wolf of Wall Street.” A sexy, glamorous gold digger in the movie opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, Robbie, Yates was surprised to learn, had just been backpacking around Europe and staying in hostels with her little brother.
“She’s very earthy, very pragmatic, which I love about her,” the director says. “She knows her own mind.”
From the rural Gold Coast in Australia far from cities like Melbourne and Sidney, Robbie says she was obsessed with the Harry Potter books as a child. “When I heard they were to cast the movie, I remember thinking, ‘I’m the right age. How do I even get an audition?’ ”
By 17, a determined Robbie was in Melbourne getting roles, and now she’s not only starring in films (“Suicide Squad” comes out in August) but producing them with her company LuckyChap Entertainment. She’ll be on the cover of the next month’s Vanity Fair, as well.
Growing up, Skarsgard was less interested in acting. A friend of his dad — Stellan Skarsgard, who also has a film out this week — cast him in a film when he was seven. He took roles until he was 13. But when he started getting public attention, he decided he didn’t want to do it ever again. He changed his mind in his early 20s, working mostly in his native Sweden.
He became known to American audiences in 2008 through two HBO shows — as a Marine in the miniseries “Generation Kill” and as a thousand-year-old Viking vampire in the series “True Blood.”
As a boy, Skarsgard watched Tarzan films with his father. “My dad was a massive fan of the old Johnny Weissmuller movies. He would say this is the best bad-ass dude ever. So obviously I got really excited when I was sent the script for the film. I never dreamed I would get a chance to play Tarzan.”
The new film flips the usual ape-man story by opening with a sophisticated Lord Greystoke living in Britain with his wife when he is asked by his country’s ministers to go on a public-relations tour to the Congo sponsored by King Leopold II of Belgium, who controls the diamond-rich region. The invitation is a trap, though, masterminded by Belgium Captain Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz), who made a deal with enemies from Tarzan’s past.
Despite his reservations, Greystoke agrees and is accompanied by Jane and George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson), an American politician who believes Belgium is enslaving people. Including Rom and Williams, real historical figures, is a dramatic contrast to the racist elements and stereotypes found in the original stories.
To help Skarsgard get into the role, the director brought in choreographer Wayne McGregor to work with the actor on his movement. They wanted Lord Greystoke to occasionally give physical clues to his ape upbringing, and as the action moves to the jungle those elements become more pronounced.
The director had McGregor conduct sessions with Robbie and Skarsgard “to explore the characters’ physical relationship.”
“We wouldn’t speak. It was almost like contemporary dancing,” explains Robbie. “Hopefully, it’s evident on screen when we act as a husband and wife,” adds Skarsgard.
“I wanted their relationship to feel as sensual as possible,” says Yates, “and often that’s captured in a tiny moment.”
In this film, Jane is a strong-willed American who was brought up in Africa.
“I wasn’t going to stand around looking stupid waiting for someone to help me,” she says about playing Jane. So even when Jane was taken hostage, Robbie kept whacking the two actors who played her captor. “They were cool with me giving them little punches and kicks or a head butt.”
“I think David said you threw more punches than I did,” says Skarsgard to Robbie.
“Probably,” admits the actress, though she throws more in the upcoming “Suicide Squad” where she plays Harley Quinn, a psychiatrist and a psychopath.
Robbie was happy not to wear a corset, a common garment for women of the era — “I couldn’t see Jane doing that.” However, she did run around in multi-layered Victorian clothing, which means she never gets down to the skimpy jungle outfit often associated with the character.
”It was like winning a game of strip poker. There was always another layer underneath,” she jokes.
The action in “The Legend of Tarzan” was filmed in “the jungles of the England,” as Robbie calls the giant film sets built at Warner Bros. Studios in Leavesden. To recreate the African landscape, filmmakers built a water tank 100 feet long and about 40 feet high, a working mountain waterfall and natural plants mixed in with fabricated trees and fauna.
Actual jungle scenes were filmed in Gabon, including some from a helicopter with six cameras that provided a 360-degree perspective, and seamlessly stitched together with the sets.
“It is quite extraordinary what we are able to do that we couldn’t five or six years ago,” says Yates, who has been working on “Tarzan” and JK Rowling’s “Fantastic Beasts” almost simultaneously for 3½ years.
With the pressures of making two big-budget films with complicated special effects, you might think Yates would be ready to take a break, but he’s philosophical about it. “Every day is a holiday when you’re making movies like ‘Tarzan’ and ‘Beasts.’ It’s a pleasure to get to tell stories on such a big canvas.”
