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.