America is so far gone, we have to go to Australia to find a girl next door. In case you’ve missed it, her name is Margot Robbie. 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. As I said, she is from Australia. To understand her, you should think about what that means. Australia is America 50 years ago, sunny and slow, a throwback, which is why you go there for throwback people. They still live and die with the plot turns of soap operas in Melbourne and Perth, still dwell in a single mass market in Adelaide and Sydney. In the morning, they watch Australia’s Today show. In other words, it’s just like America, only different. When everyone here is awake, everyone there is asleep, which makes it a perfect perch from which to study our customs, habits, accents. An ambitious Australian actor views Hollywood the way the Martians view Earth at the beginning of The War of the Worlds. Which was Robbie. Auditioning and acting and studying from afar as she waited for the perfect moment, the perfect wave, which she rode from the beach in front of her town on the Australian coast all the way to the billboards along Sunset Boulevard, where her face is blown up to monstrous size in an effort to sell not one but two summer blockbusters: The Legend of Tarzan, a new take on the classic, co-starring Alexander Skarsgård, and Suicide Squad, a Batman offshoot co-starring Jared Leto and Will Smith, in which Robbie plays the Joker’s sidekick, fan favorite Harley Quinn.

I met Margot in the restaurant in the Mark hotel, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It’s a celebrity haunt. You sense them in the shadows, in their booths, tracking you with suspicious eyes. 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. We sat in the corner. She looked at me and smiled.

Robbie grew up in Gold Coast, a city on Australia’s Pacific shore, 500 miles north of Sydney. In an old movie, you might have seen a crossroad sign demonstrating just how isolated it was, just how far from the known capitals. Four thousand miles to Tokyo. Ten thousand miles to London. Seven thousand miles to Los Angeles. Margot lived with her mother and three siblings—her parents divorced when she was a kid—in a house in the hills, the sleepiest part of a sleepy city at the bottom of the world. Her mother is a physiotherapist. Her father does some farming and some other stuff. 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. When she talks about it, you see the arid country, the horizon on every side, blue sky, yellow fields. “But I don’t like to talk about it,” she says, because it only “encourages stereotypes. People always want to know, ‘Did you have kangaroos outside your bedroom window?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, but none of my other friends did.’ Or ‘Did you have snakes running around?’ And again, ‘Yes, in our house, but this isn’t an Australian thing.’ ”

Robbie started acting in high school. A natural, as comfortable onstage as off. “When I was little, I thought I was going to be a magician,” she told me. “I had tricks and thought they were genius. I didn’t decide, ‘I’m going to be an actress.’ I didn’t know that was a job. I thought that only happened to people born in Hollywood. But I put on shows at home, and I used to watch videos over and over and knew them by heart. I did drama at school and was in all the plays just because I liked doing it.”

VIDEO: Watch Margot Robbie Define 50 Australian Slang Terms in Under 4 Minutes

When Robbie was 16, she was asked to perform in an independent movie shooting locally, a kind of student film. A few weeks on set was enough to turn her all around. Just like that, she was headed to Melbourne, capital of the Australian TV industry. She had an agent by then, and a schedule of auditions. She landed a spot on a children’s show, The Elephant Princess, “which, funnily enough, I was doing with Liam Hemsworth before he was known and before I was known.”

She stuck around Melbourne for weeks, crashing in the apartments of friends, taking off the moment before she’d overstayed her welcome—she could anticipate it like a change in weather. “Couch-surfing, that’s an art.” Now and then, she’d get a small part in prime time. Her agent wanted her to audition for Neighbours, the Australian soap opera. Robbie’s beauty and speed of ascent mask her ambition, the part hustle and savvy have played. She hunted down the name of the Neighboursproduction company, then began to bombard it. “I called every day, and, eventually, one day, they put me through to Jan Russ, a producer for Neighbours,” Robbie said. “I got her on the phone just as I was about to leave Melbourne. And I was like, ‘Oh, I’m here filming a guest role in City Homicide—can I meet you?’ I went in and she was like, ‘How old are you?’ ‘Seventeen.’ And she says, ‘We’re casting for a 17-year-old girl right now . . .’ ”

A few weeks later, Robbie made her debut as Donna Freedman, a kind of groupie who never shuts up. “I’d sit in the makeup chair and have 60 pages to memorize because my character spoke so much,” she told me. “She was the one that would walk in and be a whirlwind, bluh bluh bluh, la, la, la, talk, talk, talk, and run out again. We did an episode a day. In film terms, that’s insane. It was amazing training.”

A few weeks after that, she was famous. In Australia.

I asked if people back home were proud of her success.

She thought a moment, then said, “There’s a thing in Australia called tall-poppy syndrome. Have you heard of it? It’s a pretty prevalent thing—they even teach it in school. Poppies are tall flowers, but they don’t grow taller than the rest of the flowers, so there’s a mentality in Australia where people are really happy for you to do well; you just can’t do better than everyone else or they will cut you down to size.”

Neighbours, Home and Away—the biggest Australian soaps serve as a kind of farm system for the American movie industry. At one time or another, just about every actor who starred in an Aussie soap has gone to Hollywood. Some succeeded. Russell Crowe, Naomi Watts, Guy Pearce, Heath Ledger, Chris Hemsworth. Most failed. Robbie studied these people and their fates as you might study the lives of the saints, paying special attention to the washouts. Failure is what teaches you—you learn more from a wreck than from a victory. When her Neighbours deal came up for renewal, she took off instead, heading to L.A., where she auditioned for ABC’s short-lived Charlie’s Angels TV reboot. She did not get the part, but, as they say, the ABC executives liked her for something else: Pan Am, a splashy flight-attendant series riding the post-Mad Men craze for midcentury New York. She sublimated her Aussie accent for that reading, swapping it for a flat Middle American twang. “You have to audition in front of the network,” she told me. “It’s called a test, and they test, say, three to six actors for a role. You are in front of a panel of network executives, and the show-runner, and all that, in a room with a spotlight. It’s horrible, the most intimidating process ever. And you have to sign your contract before they test; you sign on to do seven years before you even know [if you’ve got the part]. They don’t want to waste time testing people who will turn around and say, ‘I’m worth a million dollars an episode.’ ”

Robbie landed a role as Laura Cameron, a runaway bride who ditches married life for the romance of silver wings, jet engines, and blue skies. She spoke about how fun it was to live and work in New York. An apartment in Williamsburg. Evenings on the stoops. The accents and the characters, the overheard snatches of street comedy.

After the first few episodes, it was clear to Robbie that Pan Am would not make it to a second season. “As soon as it went on-air, they were like, ‘No, we didn’t get the ratings we want—let’s get a whole new crew of writers and make it more like Housewives.’ And you’re like, ‘What? That’s so not what the show was going to be.’ After the fifth episode, you see this abrupt change in content. If they’re rehiring writers, it’s obviously not doing well. If they don’t pick up the back nine, it’s pretty certain that you won’t go for a Season Two.”

Meanwhile, she was sneaking off to auditions. She read for the part of Naomi—“the Duchess of Bay Ridge”—in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, based on the adventures of rogue trader Jordan Belfort. In the screenplay, Terence Winter describes the character simply as “the hottest blonde ever.” A Brooklyn-born striver, the Duchess hitches herself to a drug-addled, morally compromised wunderkind played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Robbie went off script in the audition to slap DiCaprio hard across the face. And got the part. Other roles followed, none particularly memorable. As Celine Joseph in Suite Française. As a war reporter in Tina Fey’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. As a con artist being schooled by Will Smith in Focus. But none of that matters. It was Wolfthat defined her. It put her up with Sharon Stone in Casino and Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull—one of Scorsese’s women.

Because Robbie is new on the scene, reporters are trying to fix her with a narrative. The job of the celebrity journalist: peg ‘em so it’s not only as if you know ‘em but always have known ‘em or someone just like ‘em. But Robbie is too fresh to be pegged. Less being than becoming. The most recent theory has her as a celebrity uncomfortable with fame. A case of buyer’s remorse. She speaks of her older brother, a stuntman who gets all the excitement of the movies without the downside of fame. Being recognized, looked at, harassed. Is that the better life, just a professional among professionals, nobody better, better than nobody? I asked Robbie about this emerging story line. I called it a thesis. Is it true? Are you the famous woman who does not want to be famous?

“It’s [true] to an extent, but it’s not the thesis of me as a person,” she said. “When you put it as a thesis, it seems like it’s the only question on my mind. But it’s just one of the questions, one of the things I wonder. How would things be different if I’d made different choices?”

The fact is, despite her growing fame, higher-profile roles, and endorsement deals—Robbie is the face of the new Calvin Klein fragrance Deep Euphoria—she leads a fairly ordinary life. It’s the luxury of being from the bottom of the world. In the major roles, she’s had to wear a new accent in addition to costumes and makeup. When the shooting is over, she drops back into her normal voice, vanishes. In sneakers and slang, she fades into the New York street. Or the London street. That’s where she lives, in an apartment with not-famous friends, always a tricky prospect. This includes her boyfriend, Tom Ackerley, whom she met while shooting Suite Française—he was an assistant director—her childhood friend and personal assistant, Sophia Kerr, and another friend, Josey McNamara. Together, the roommates have formed a production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, which is developing projects for Robbie, including Terminal, a Vaughan Stein thriller, and, my favorite, the Tonya Harding story, in which Robbie will remake herself into the most American character we’ve ever had.

I asked her about the accents, especially the spot-on depiction of coastal Brooklyn in The Wolf of Wall Street. Once upon a time, the downtown trains were filled with girls who spoke just like that. Robbie told me that she’d already spent two years figuring out how to sound American, “two years learning about the muscles in your mouth and bone structures and resonators and all that, so I had a good foundation.” For Wolf, she carried on with dialect coach Tim Monich, “one of the best in the world,” said Robbie. “Real people. We based it on women from Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge.”

How did you leave the soap opera?, I asked.

“I wanted a big dramatic death,” she said, “but they were like, ‘No, we want to keep it open. That way, when it doesn’t work out in America, you can come back to your job here.’ So my character in Neighbours got a scholarship at a fashion school in New York.”

What about your first days in the U.S.—what were they like?

She laughed. “I remember watching American movies and TV shows growing up and thinking, Oh, God, these crazy characters doing these outlandish things, how do the writers come up with it? Then I moved to America and met so many people just like the people in the movies, and I realized, Oh, so this is just real life in America.”

We talked about Suicide Squad, the Batman spin-off that opens this month. Robbie plays Harley Quinn, a New York psychiatrist who fell for the Joker while he was in therapy, becoming first his love interest, then his sidekick and a super-villain in her own right. The character, who came into Batman via the animated series in 1992, was willed onto the screen by the passion of a million Gotham City geeks. There is a danger in personifying such a beloved avatar, but pictures of Robbie in costume—pigtails dyed red and blue, dark-red lipstick, crazy smile, and wielding a baseball bat, like one of the gangsters in The Warriors—have stirred happy anticipation in the community. Warner Bros. has already begun developing a film that Robbie’s Harley Quinn will anchor, with the actress also taking on producing duties.

What is Harley Quinn? That scariest of all circus anomalies, the sexy clown. “She loves causing mayhem and destruction,” Robbie told me. “She’s incredibly devoted to the Joker. They have a dysfunctional relationship, but she loves him anyway. She used to be a gymnast—that’s her skill set when fighting.”

The conversation finally came around to Tarzan. For the last several years of his life, the great bearish movie producer Jerry Weintraub, who died while the film was in postproduction, had been trying to get Tarzanback to the big screen. Tarzan, the classic of Jerry’s outer-borough youth, the dark theaters of the Bronx, the jungle cry and swinging vines. It was the old man’s white whale, the holy grail shining at the end of the dream, on and off the rails, as he chased scripts, directors, and movie stars of the proper magnitude. “George Burns played God,” he said at one point, “but this is Tarzan!” For a moment Jerry believed he’d found Tarzan in Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. It was all Jerry talked about. “It’s going to be like Johnny Weissmuller,” Jerry told me. “All the reporters are going to say, ‘Weintraub found the new Johnny Weissmuller!’ ” At that point, Jerry had never seen Phelps do anything but get in and out of a pool. Then, as if arranged, the swimmer hosted Saturday Night Live. As this went on past Jerry’s bedtime, he asked his assistant to record it. I was working with Jerry on his memoir at the time, a project that grew out of a 2008 Vanity Fair profile, and so sat beside him the next morning in his living room in Beverly Hills, identical breakfasts on identical trays set before us, my portions slightly smaller. As he watched Phelps’s monologue, I watched him, his mood shifting from excited to perturbed, green to red. Two minutes in, Jerry turned to his assistant and shouted, “This isn’t Tarzan! This isn’t Johnny Weissmuller! He’s a goon! Why didn’t anyone tell me he’s a goon? Turn it off. Goddammit, turn it off.”

That was the middle of a search that finally led to Alexander Skarsgård as Tarzan and Robbie as Jane. Jerry spoke of the actress in a tone he reserved for the big stars, the sure things, the Clooneys and Pitts, those whose magnitude seems old-fashioned. “When I think of Margot Robbie, a single word comes to mind,” Jerry said. “Audrey Hepburn.” In comparing Robbie to the classic movie stars, Jerry Weintraub meant that she is big-time, bankable, elegant.

I would see the movie a few days later. It’s fascinating. Here is a tale in which the very premise is problematic: a white baby is dropped into darkest Africa, the mysterious Congo, and, within a generation, is king. Years later, comfortably situated in aristocratic England, he must return to free African slaves. It’s a setup that tacks hard into the wind of so many current taboos. There are moments when your heart is in your mouth and you whisper to yourself, Oh please, God, let them make it safely through the dark night of Twitter. Most of the movie was shot in England, in a faux jungle of greenscreen. The gorillas look so much like the gorillas in Planet of the Apes, you half expect a simian liberator to start talking directly to Bright Eyes.

Each generation has its own Tarzan. Mine was Christopher Lambert in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. Jerry’s was Weissmuller, the original Tarzan from the 30s and 40s. For Robbie, Tarzan was a character in a Sunday-morning cartoon.

Did you go back and watch the old Tarzans?, I asked.

“No, I didn’t want to have any preconceived notions on how I should play it,” she said. “It would mess with my head.”

She thought for a moment, then said, “I just saw a screening of our Tarzan. It was sad to watch it, knowing that Jerry won’t get to see it. It sucks . . . it’s a thing he always wanted to do. That’s what he said: ‘I’ve been wanting to make this for so long.’ ”

This made me feel lonesome and sad. The notion that a person like Jerry Weintraub can just vanish from the earth, that he can be removed like a piece from the chessboard, and the game goes on—it’s so ludicrous, such a cruel pie in the face of humanity, it’s better we don’t even talk about it. Of course, I could not stop thinking about him. In his red silk robe, with his pale legs and ankles, lying atop his bed in Beverly Hills, his German shepherd, Sonny, at his side, drinking a vodka or saying a prayer or calling through the intercom for Susie Ekins, his significant other and a producer on Tarzan—Soozie. Sooz. Soozie. Sooz.

I looked at Robbie in a new way, tried to see her as she must have looked to Jerry. An echo, a throwback. “A single word: Audrey Hepburn.” From another place, another time. In her, Jerry may have seen a kind of lost purity, what we’ve given up for the excitement of a crass, freewheeling, sex-saturated culture. It’s a revolution suggested by two points in the Margot Robbie oeuvre. It’s how Pan Am, a fantasy of jet-age America, where Bryn Mawr girls took to the skies in search of husbands, becomes Jordan Belfort’s Wall Street, where the Duchess stands nude in a doorway, turning slowly, like a Ferrari on a showroom platform, a human being remade by the late 20th century, coked up, cashed out, and hung on the wall like a trophy.

I asked Robbie about the sex scenes. In Wolf, she partakes in some of the most graphic on-screen shenanigans I’ve ever seen, famously short-skirted in one scene, pushing a crawling DiCaprio away with the toe of her designer shoe, saying, “Mommy is just so sick and tired of wearing panties.”

“In that first low-budget film I did in Australia, I had a shower scene,” she told me. “So I was practically naked there as well, but it wasn’t anywhere as much as in Wolf, but it was still . . .”

She paused a moment, then went on.

“Actually, I hadn’t done a proper sex scene before. I’d done scenes where it’s leading into sex or sex has just finished, but I hadn’t done a start-to-finish sex scene like I did in Wolf. That was my first.”

“Is there any way to prepare?”

“No. Tons of people are watching you.”

“Were you worried you were not going to be able to do it?”

“There isn’t an option. It’s just like, This is what you need to do—get on with it. The sooner you do it, the sooner you can stop doing it.”

“It just seems very awkward.”

“It’s so awkward.”

We sat for a moment in silence. She was thinking of something; I was thinking of something else. Then she stood, said good-bye, and went to see a friend across the room. Jerry was right. She looked just like Audrey Hepburn going away.

Video: Behind the Scenes of Margot Robbie’s Cover Shoot