Margot Robbie is swapping her Harley Quinn pigtails for Queen Elizabeth I’s crown. The Hollywood Reporter writes that the “Suicide Squad” actress will play Queen Elizabeth in Josie Rourke’s “Mary Queen of Scots.” “Brooklyn’s” Saoirse Ronan is set to star as the titular Mary Stuart, Elizabeth’s cousin.
Written by Penelope Skinner (“How I Live Now”) and Michael Hirst (“The Tudors”), the biopic “will take on the historical family rivalry between Elizabeth and Mary, when the latter attempted to overthrow her cousin’s seat on the English thrown,” THR reports.
The Working Title and Focus Features film will be produced by Liza Chasin, Tim Bevan, and Eric Fellner. The trio previously collaborated on the Stephen Hawking biopic “The Theory of Everything.”
“In a Better World” director Susanne Bier was originally linked to “Mary Queen of Scots.” She spoke to Women and Hollywood in 2014 about the project and her collaboration with Skinner. “Mary was very young when she became queen. Basically, she was queen from age five, but she became a real queen when she was 17,” Bier told us. “And we wanted to have that because part of the excitement is to have that young girl have the power of a queen. That was so exciting.”
We don’t know why Bier is no longer involved in the project, but we’re happy that another female director was selected to take the reins. Best known as a theater director, Rourke has previously helmed productions of “Much Ado About Nothing,” “The Vote,” “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” and “Saint Joan.” According to Rourke’s IMDb page, “Mary Queen of Scots” marks her feature directorial debut.
The conflict between Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart has been explored before in the 1971 Vanessa Redgrave-starrer “Mary, Queen of Scots,” and the 2013 “Mary Queen of Scots,” starring Camille Rutherford (“Blue Is the Warmest Color.” “Elizabeth,” the 1998 film toplined by Cate Blanchett, touched upon the hostility between Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart’s mother, Mary of Guise (Fanny Ardant, “Ridicule”).
Robbie has a number of projects on her plate. She stars in “I, Tonya,” a biopic a comedy about controversial Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding currently in post-production. Among Robbie’s other upcoming films are “Marian,” a new iteration of Robin Hood folklore, a spinoff for her “Suicide Squad” character Harley Quinn and other female villains of the DC Comics universe, “Queen of the Air,” in which she’ll play a trapeze artist, and “Beautiful Things,” a thriller set in a zoo.
Ronan is also plenty busy. The Oscar-nominated actress has roles in Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut “Lady Bird” and an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach.” The “Atonement” actress is also set to play a refugee in a big screen adaptation of Camilla Gibb’s best-selling 2007 novel “Sweetness in the Belly.”
