Hollywood is filled with power couples: Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. Beyoncé and JAY-Z. Ellen DeGeneres and Portia De Rossi. But one of our favourite dynamic duos flies more under the radar than others. We're talking about Margot Robbie and her husband, Tom Ackerley.
If you read that sentence and wondered, Wait. Who? You're not alone. Robbie and Ackerly, a British film director and producer, are pretty private about their relationship. They don't post a ton of selfies on social media and their red carpet appearances are few and far between. But the work they do behind the scenes with their production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, is anything but private.
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Robbie and Ackerly founded LuckyChap in 2014 with friends Josey McNamara and Sophia Kerr with the goal of supporting female creators and telling more women's stories on screen. To date, they've produced I, Tonya (2017), Terminal (2018), Dreamland (2019), and Hulu's Dollface (2019).
LuckyChap is hard at work filling Hollywood with even more women-led films, and 2020 will be their biggest year yet. Birds of Prey, directed by Cathy Yan and written by Christina Hodson, just hit cinemas on 7th February. Promising Young Woman, written and directed by Emerald Fennell and starring Carey Mulligan, arrives in cinemas on 17th April. LuckyChap will also start working on Maid, a project adapted from Stephanie Land's 2019 memoir of the same name. And finally, they'll continue developing the much-anticipated Barbie film adaptation. Robbie will star, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig will write the script, and Gerwig will direct.
Robbie and Ackerley met on the set of the 2014 film Suite Française. Robbie played Celine, a young woman who lives in a building owned by Madame Angellier (played by Kristin Scott Thomas). Ackerley worked behind the scenes as a third assistant director.
After rumours of their engagement swirled for months, Robbie confirmed the news on Instagram in December 2016 with a shot of her and Ackerly kissing. But the real focus of the picture was her ring finger, which she proudly flashed to the camera. Robbie didn't include a caption, but she didn't need to; her pear-shaped engagement ring spoke for itself.
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Robbie and Ackerly tied the knot in 2017 in a private ceremony in Australia's Gold Coast near Dalby, her hometown. They currently live in Los Angeles.
Robbie was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Bombshell at the 2020 Academy Awards. LuckyChap was recognised at the 2018 Academy Awards when Allison Janney brought home the statue for Best Supporting Actress in I, Tonya.
And as Robbie and Ackerly continue to push LuckyChap's mission of promoting and hiring female artists, there will be way more where that came from.