Watch: Why Margot Robbie Is Keeping Details About Her Family Life Private One Year After Welcoming Baby
Margot Robbie channeled her teenage self to reach the emotional depths felt by the tempestuous Cathy in Wuthering Heights.
“You know, when my hormones were wild and I’d be ecstatic one second and devastated the next,” she explained to PA Media about getting ready to play the starcrossed lover of Jacob Elordi‘s Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell‘s steamy adaptation of the Emily Brontë classic. “When I was younger, before I realized how to protect myself emotionally, I think I felt things so big. One emotion would swing into the next so quickly.”
Robbie, who’s turning 36 on July 2, still experiences big feelings, especially now that she’s a mom, but she hasn’t had the inclination to stagger across any misty moors since meeting Tom Ackerley.
“I am so lucky,” the Australian actress told E! News at the 2024 Critics Choice Awards of her British partner in life and LuckyChap Entertainment, both of them essential in shepherding the Greta Gerwig-directed Barbie to the screen. “He likes being behind the camera. He’s not fazed by any of this stuff.”
Ackerley’s coolness was key to eventually winning the heart of the self-described “ultimate single gal,” who gave birth to their son in October 2024, months after the end of the Barbenheimer awards season hoopla.
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“The idea of relationships made me want to vomit,” Robbie told Vogue in 2016 about her bygone bachelorette days. “And then this crept up on me. We were friends for so long. I was always in love with him, but I thought, ‘Oh, he would never love me back. Don’t make it weird, Margot. Don’t be stupid and tell him that you like him.'”
Nor did she push Ackerley around or take him for granted.
“And then it happened,” Robbie continued, “and I was like, ‘Of course we’re together. This makes so much sense, the way nothing has ever made sense before.'”
They first met in 2013 when Ackerley served as third assistant director on the WWII-era romance Suite Française, in which Robbie had a supporting role. She bonded with him and several other crew members, and when she rolled back through London to do press for The Wolf of Wall Street early the following year, they all decided to get a place together.
It was while sharing a three-bedroom house in Clapham with five roommates, including future business partners Kerr (Robbie’s mate since childhood) and McNamara (second AD on Suite Française), that Ackerley and Robbie’s friendship quickly blossomed into more.
They kept it a secret at first, Robbie later told The Guardian, “because we weren’t really taking it seriously.”
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But since they were meant to be, they eventually had to come clean to their housemates.
“Everyone was, like, ‘No! This is going to ruin our group!'” Robbie recalled. “And then it didn’t. It was fine.”
Not only that, but LuckyChap—the actress said they were “just drunk” when they and cofounders Josey McNamara and Sophia Kerr came up with the name—thrived, hastening the founders’ move to L.A. in November 2016.
A month later, Robbie and Ackerley quietly headed to Australia to tie the knot on the beach in Byron Bay, having never publicly shared that they were engaged. Word got out, but it was a photo of the bride—who doesn’t do social media— flashing her sparkling ring finger in the direction of a camera while she kissed her groom that ultimately served as confirmation.
And then, the newlyweds were kicked out of the fold.
“It was our roommates who told us, ‘You guys had a wedding. You have to live on your own now,'” Robbie told The Guardian. “It honestly hadn’t occurred to us. We were, like, ‘Hmm? What? Just the two of us? That’s gonna be weird.’ And the first time we were in a house, the two of us, it was weird. Nice. But we missed having heaps of people around.”
Sure enough, when she spoke to Vogue in the summer of 2019, the Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood actress divulged that her older brother, as well as a cousin and her husband, were living with her and Ackerley.
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“It’s a common theme, isn’t it?” Robbie noted. “I hate—hate—being alone.”
Close quarters don’t bother her, either. After Barbie wrapped in 2022, she and Ackerley took the British Pullman from London and then overnighted on the Orient Express from Paris to Venice. Then, on a trip to Japan, they rode the seven-car Seven Stars across the island of Kyushu.
“All I want to do,” Robbie explained to Vogue, “is live on a train.”
Eating also factors heavily into their relationship, both abroad (they waited in line for three and a half hours to sample udon carbonara in Tokyo) and at home, where she tends to steer clear of the kitchen.
“My husband is a phenomenal cook,” Robbie raved on a February episode of the Table Manners podcast. “He could be a chef, he is so good. We are like a perfect match.”
But she didn’t marry him for his knife skills, noting that she didn’t even know he was a great cook until after they had swapped vows.
“He spends two days making a spaghetti bolognese,” she explained. “He does a three-day fried rice with Korean short ribs. He does steak better than any restaurant I’ve ever been to!”
As for her own culinary acumen, Robbie pointed to the time she served undercooked ham to her in-laws one Christmas in the U.K.
“I watched his grandma nearly put a raw piece of pork in her mouth,” the actress recalled. “She could have died so I slapped it out of her hand!”
Robbie does, however, take pride in being great at spending time with Ackerley, seamlessly mixing business with pleasure.
“I’m a great advocate of doing business with your partner,” she told Porter in 2018. “Being married is actually the most fun ever, life got way more fun somehow. I have a responsibility being someone’s wife, I want to be better.”
At the same time, Robbie told Vogue Australia, they were “still best friends and roommates, so nothing’s really changed at all.”
Other than that pear-shaped diamond ring, which she wore on weekends. “I can’t obviously wear it during the week when I’m working,” she said. “I don’t want to lose it on set.”
If she and Ackerley have to be apart, they abide by a three-weeks-at-most rule. “Even if we both have to fly to a country in-between where we both are for one night,” Robbie told Porter, “we’ll do it and then fly back to work the next day. And we speak all day, every day on the phone.”
Not to mention, communication is key when you’re making history together.
Having decided in 2018 that Hollywood’s long-gestating Barbie movie was the perfect project for LuckyChap, Robbie enlisted Gerwig to write the script.
She and Ackerley read the screenplay by Gerwig and her now-husband Noah Baumbach and were similarly gobsmacked by page one.
“We just looked at each other, pure panic on our faces,” Robbie told Vogue ahead of Barbie‘s July 21, 2023, release. “We were like, Holy f–king s–t. I think the first thing I said to Tom was, This is so genius. It is such a shame that we’re never going to be able to make this movie.”
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But they were determined to make it happen.
“We spent time at Mattel headquarters,” Robbie told the New York Times, “we went into their factories, we watched them make a doll and we talked to people who make them. They knew we were coming from a place of respecting the brand.”
She and Ackerley also had long conversations with Mattel executives as the protectors of the doll’s complicated image combed through Gerwig’s script line by line.
But while Ackerley was a hands-on producer, he was happy for Robbie to be the face of Barbie in more ways than one.
“I think this’ll be the [marketing campaign] they do dissertations on,” Ackerley told The Upcoming at the film’s London premiere, hanging out with fellow producer David Heyman while Robbie was belle of the ball. And he acknowledged that his wife and Ryan Gosling made for a “great combination” as Barbie and Ken.
“He’s usually a very loud and friendly person,” Robbie told Vogue in 2019 of her less public-facing husband, “but he’s definitely behind the cam.”
But that set-up is win-win because, she explained, “We can talk about work all the time. And then work feels like fun. And fun stuff can involve work.”
“We just get along,” she added. “I think it’s crazy that not all couples get along.”
But while she’s still happy to extol her husband’s fine qualities, Robbie has had decidedly less to say about their son, whose name they have chosen not to share with the world.
“I’m trying to keep that side of things private and protect him,” she told British Vogue in an interview published Dec. 5. “Earlier in my career, I’d speak more freely in interviews. I’ve just been burnt so many times, when people have taken what I’ve said out of context. And I read stuff all the time where people put me in quotation marks saying things I’ve never said.”
“When you shift from your 20s to your 30s and beyond,” she continued, “you think, ‘I am going to do things differently. Here are my new boundaries.’”
That being said, Robbie told Entertainment Tonight last August that motherhood was “the best.”
And if you weren’t already inspired enough to go out and marry your roommate, read on for the full timeline of Robbie and Ackerley’s friends-to-so-much-more love story:
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(Originally published Feb. 13, 2026, at 12 a.m. PT)
