DOING LIFE TOGETHER
The LuckyChap partnership doesn’t follow the patterns you might expect it to. Robbie’s tastes align most closely with McNamara’s, rather than with those of her childhood friend or her spouse. Kerr is the searcher, always looking for new intellectual property. Ackerley is the dreamer, thinking of the next big idea. The others joke that McNamara is the pessimist. When they talk about it, they finish each other’s sentences again.
“I say I’m a realist,” says McNamara. “Tom is very much a dreamer in a big sense, and I’m very much like, come back down.”
Ackerley laughs. “And then we find a middle-ground,” says Robbie. Kerr adds: “We wouldn’t be in half the places that we’re in currently if it wasn’t for the dreamer in Tom that’s like, ‘Let’s do it! Let’s do it!’ And Margot and I are very quick to jump on the train like yeeaah! And Josey’s like okay, let’s just sit back—”
Josey McNamara. All portraits by John Russo.
“How do we actually do that?” says Ackerley, completing Kerr’s thought, while simultaneously giving McNamara’s view, on his friend’s behalf.
What the pink neon sign may resemble most of all, when you stare at it, is the iconic logo for Mattel’s Barbie. That’s the other big film on LuckyChap’s slate: Robbie is expected to play Barbie in a modernized take on the living doll, written by moviemakers and real-life partners Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.
We’ve all heard about the perils of working with people you like or love, but you don’t often hear about the rewards.
“You genuinely care about what their opinion is on something,” Kerr says. “You can bring something in, and you can feel passionately about it, and I genuinely want to hear what Margot has
to say, or how Josey feels about it.”
She adds: “We are the luckiest chaps in town.”
“Our lawyer tells us how much of a rarity it is that we make it work as friends,” says McNamara.
“It’s nice to be in business with people,” says Robbie, “where I already know we’re going to do life together anyway.”
Birds of Prey, a LuckyChap Entertainment co-production, is in theaters Friday.
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