Film Twitter and Reddit, daunted by the possibility of just another boring Tuesday, allegedly discovered Margot Robbie’s Letterboxd account. Username MaggieAckerley, a now-defunct account, appears to use a combination of the actor’s nickname and her husband’s last name. With screenshots of the page making their way through Twitter timelines, fans began to dissect the account’s public lists of movies that could be research for upcoming Robbie-led films, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon.
While we cannot speak to whatever shenanigans fans pulled to find what they claim to be the Barbie star’s burner account, we can say that the account lived a short, tragic life in the public eye. By the evening of May 18, whoever runs the MaggieAckerley Letterboxd shut down the page and, with it, our insight into what could be the extremely offline actor’s cinephilic activity. Amid all of the hullabaloo online, Letterboxd’s official Twitter account issued a statement: “Margot Robbie does not officially have a Letterboxd that we know of.†That we know of. So please, join us for a celebration of the life of Margot Robbie’s alleged Letterboxd account, then maybe touch some grass.
According to screenshots, MaggieAckerley posted watchlists for two upcoming Robbie-led projects. For Barbie, the account listed two Jacques Demy flicks to study: The Young Girls of Rochefort and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Films Splash and The Truman Show along with the Australian TV series Puberty Blues round out the list. Perhaps we can expect a color-saturated, coming-of-age musical rich with tunes about a Barbie girl breaking out of her Barbie world?
For Babylon, the Letterboxd account lists period-appropriate films as the ones to watch, perhaps in order to soak up all the flavor of the film set in the Roaring ’20s. Babylon tells the story of real-life actor Clara Bow during the film industry’s transition from silent films to sound. Here in the roaring 2020s, MaggieAckerly’s viewing activity would really give ’em a shock, with recent activity including A24’s Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Gone but not forgotten, people continue to gush over MaggieAckerley’s views. Screenshots reveal that she’s had a recent affinity with classic Hollywood films from the 1940s, watching Hitchcock’s Notorious and Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait. Now, if she was watching Barbara Stanwyck and Norma Shearer Pre-Code movies …