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How 'cheap strip malls' helped Margot Robbie's stunning 'I, Tonya' transformation

It’s not exactly at the Gary Oldman-as-Winston Churchill level, but Margot Robbie is getting high marks for disappearing underneath the skin of disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding in the new mockumentary I, Tonya.

“I worked a lot with a movement coach to alter my physicality and create certain mannerisms for the character of Tonya,” Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street, Suicide Squad) told Yahoo Entertainment at the film’s Los Angeles press day (watch above). “I also studied her a lot. Studied her mannerisms, her voice, her dialect. Our hair and makeup and costume designers did a ton of work replicating all the skate costumes and specific moments taken from paparazzi shots and mapped out a journey in that way.”

Considering Harding, whose skating career ended in 1994 after her associates infamously attacked rival Olympian Nancy Kerrigan, rose to prominence from lower-class Oregon in the early ’90s, the film’s stylists mined a very specific source to groom Robbie for the role.

“Our hair and makeup designers only brought products from cheap strip malls,” Robbie explained. “It had to be something that Tonya could’ve gotten her hands on at the time. Everyone really threw themselves into this character and helped create this character.”

I, Tonya is now playing in New York and Los Angeles and opens nationwide in January.

Watch the trailer:

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