We all love a good doppelgänger moment, and the Barbie movie almost went full meta with resident Barbies and famed IRL lookalikes Margot Robbie and Emma Mackey.
In case you’re not as clued-up on the internet as we are, users online have been pointing out an “uncanny” resemblance between Margot Robbie and Emma Mackey for a long time, but especially since a 2019 post by Instagram account @morphy_me, who posted a few images morphing the two actresses’ faces together. Whether you see the resemblance while their faces are separate is another story, but there’s no denying that the edit is as seamless as they come — thus, Robbie and Mackey have been closely linked ever since.
(L-R) Emma Mackey, Simu Liu, Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Kingsley Ben-Adir in Barbie COURTESY WARNER BROS. PICTURES
Both actresses have spoken up about the comparisons, and in fact, the joke runs so deep that it almost made it into the Barbie movie itself as a little inside gag. “I’ve been getting told for years that I look like the girl from Sex Education, who’s Emma Mackey,” Robbie recounted in a recent puppy interview with Buzzfeed and Barbie costar Ryan Gosling. Robbie even went as far as to suggest that one of the main reasons why Mackey was cast in Barbie in the first place was because she and director Greta Gerwig thought it’d be “funny” to cheekily reference their frequent comparisons in the movie.
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“We were gonna do this whole joke about us looking similar,” Robbie revealed, “[but] once we got all dressed up as our Barbies, we were kind of like, ‘We don’t look that similar.’ When she’s got her brown hair, and I’ve got my blonde hair, so we didn’t put that joke in the movie. But when people come up and say, ‘I loved you in Sex Education,’ I just say, ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’”
Mackey herself has also addressed the doppelgänger comparisons a handful of times. In fact, in an interview with Total Film, she also called the lookalike theories “funny” and elaborated a bit on how the uncanny elephant in the room impacted the Barbie on-set dynamics.
(L-R) Ana Cruz Kayne, Sharon Rooney, Alexandra Shipp, Margot Robbie, Hari Nef, and Emma Mackey in Barbie COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES
“Margot has had the grace and humor to be able to play on that and allow me to be in the same film as her — bless her,” said the Sex Ed star. “It’s just a joke in real life. I’m like, ‘We don’t look anything like each other.’ I don’t mind it. It’s Margot Robbie. Are you kidding me? She’s the best. I look up to her so much. I don’t mind the comparisons. But it would be nice to move past that.”
