A horrific I, Tonya set injury left Margot Robbie with a herniated disc
If you think Margot Robbie coasted through I, Tonya, consider the painful injury she refused to let stop her.
To nail Tonya Harding’s explosive skating style for I, Tonya, Margot Robbie spent five months on the ice, logging about four hours a day in lessons and drills. By the time cameras rolled in Atlanta, she says her arms started going numb — a symptom doctors traced to a herniated disc in her neck brought on by the training.
“There were lots of bumps and bruises, lots of blisters. I herniated a disc in my neck,”
Robbie said in a 2018 interview with the Daily Star. According to her, medical scans confirmed the injury, and she kept working with MRIs and cortisone injections to manage the pain while the film was shooting.
The physical push came with mental pressure too. Playing a real person whose life had been publicly dissected, Robbie wrote reminders to herself in the margins of her script to stay locked into the character and shut out the noise.
“I kept writing, ‘It ’s not about you, get over it. You are a vehicle for this character,’”
she told the outlet. The performance earned her widespread praise and an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in 2018.
One thing the team wouldn’t gamble on: a true triple axel. The jump carries such a high risk of injury that even top-tier doubles wouldn’t attempt it for the movie, so producer Tom Ackerley and the filmmakers turned to visual effects to put Harding’s signature move on screen.