Yahoo Finance 27 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About "Barbie" That You Probably Didn't Know, But Definitely Should
Barbie made its triumphant debut in theaters this past weekend, and people, myself included, are absolutely looooooving it.
The film, directed by Greta Gerwig, centers around Barbie (Margot Robbie), who's busy living her *best* life ever in Barbie Land. However, when Barbie notices things aren't quite how they should be, she and Ken (Ryan Gosling) embark on a journey to the real world to find some answers.
And in honor of the movie's release, here are 27 of the coolest and most interesting secrets that went into making it:
🚨Warning: There are MASSIVE spoilers ahead for Barbie.🚨
1.Barbie grossed over $162m during its first weekend, which is currently the biggest domestic opening weekend for a movie released in 2023 and the biggest opening for a female director ever.
2.Those are actually Margot Robbie's feet in Barbie's infamous arched feet scene. "I walked up. We had little sticky bits on the floor. Like, double-sided tape for the shoes so I could get my feet out of them," she explained. "And I was holding on to, like, a bar. I wasn't [in] a harness or anything like that. I just walked up, kind of held on to the bar above camera."
3.After Ryan Gosling was offered the role of Ken, he took a second to think about it and walked out into his backyard to coincidentally find a Ken doll "face down in the mud next to a squished lemon." He immediately texted the photo to Greta, saying, "I shall be your Ken. For his story must be told."
4.At the time of filming, Fast X was shooting on a soundstage just across the street from the Barbie set. One day, John Cena ran into his former The Suicide Squad costar Margot Robbie and asked, "Hey, would you guys be willing to have me if I could do something?" Then, he immediately got cast as a merman Ken, aka Kenmaid.
On the Today show, he explained, "In an accidental run-in with Margot Robbie, I said, 'I will pretty much do whatever you guys need, 'cause I really enjoy the movie.' And they asked me if I wanted to be a merman. I said yeah, sure."
5.Amy Schumer was originally cast to play Barbie during the very early stages of the movie. She revealed that she ended up leaving the movie due to "creative differences."
“The studio definitely didn’t want to do it the way I wanted to do it. The only way I was interested in doing it,” she said.
6.Gal Gadot was almost going to play a Barbie alongside Margot Robbie, but because of a scheduling conflict, she couldn't be in the movie.
"Gal Gadot is Barbie energy," Margot told Vogue. "Because Gal Gadot is so impossibly beautiful, but you don’t hate her for being that beautiful."
7.Ryan Gosling actually came up with the idea for Ken's Calvin Klein-inspired Ken-branded underwear. The costume designer "rushed" to make them after a late fitting so that he could wear them in the movie.
8.America Ferrera revealed that she filmed "30–50" takes of her big monologue over two days. Ariana Greenblatt, who plays America's daughter in the movie, could recite the entire monologue herself by the time they wrapped that scene.
“It's one of the first things Greta mentioned to me even before I read the script,” she told Vanity Fair. “She said, ‘I wrote this monologue for Gloria, and I've always imagined you saying this.'"
9.The movie's production actually emptied a company's worldwide supply of bright pink paint. The vice president of Rosco, the paint company, said that while during the pandemic, there already was a shortage of paint, "[The Barbie movie] did clean us out on paint."
In coming up with Barbie Land, Greta Gerwig said that she "wanted the pinks to be very bright, and everything to be almost too much." She also explained that there were several meetings solely about which color pinks they'd use.
10.Since Barbie was invented in 1959, a lot of Barbie Land was created with that specific '50s style in mind.
"It felt like we could ground everything in that look of 1950s soundstage musicals. Gene Kelly or Vincente Minnelli, those kind of wonderfully fake but emotionally artificial spaces. ... One thing that those soundstage musicals did so well were beautiful artificial skies. There's a sort of surrealness of the gradation of color," said Greta.
11.Because the Barbie Land set was so extravagant — and I mean, just look at it — friends filming at other soundstages frequently came to visit to see what it looked like. The cast of Fast X was among those stopping by.
Greta even cried when she first saw the finished set.
12.The set design team built an entire mini replica of Barbie Land before building the life-size version that we see in the movie.
13.Greta said she had to fight to keep the scene in the Real World where Barbie sees an older woman on a bench and tells her she's beautiful.
“I love that scene so much,” Gerwig told Rolling Stone. “And the older woman on the bench is the costume designer Ann Roth. She’s a legend. It’s a cul-de-sac of a moment, in a way — it doesn’t lead anywhere. And in early cuts, looking at the movie, it was suggested, ‘Well, you could cut it. And actually, the story would move on just the same.’ And I said, ‘If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about.’”
14.Greta also explained that she wanted to end the movie with a "mic drop" and felt like Barbie's final line, "I'm here to see my gynecologist," was funny, but emotional at the same time.
“With this film, it was important for me that everything operated on at least two levels,” Greta said. “I knew I wanted to end on a mic drop kind of joke, but I also find it very emotional. When I was a teenage girl, I remember growing up and being embarrassed about my body, and just feeling ashamed in a way that I couldn't even describe. It felt like everything had to be hidden."
“And then to see Margot as Barbie, with this big old smile on her face, saying what she says at the end with such happiness and joy,” she added. “I was like, if I can give girls that feeling of, 'Barbie does it, too' — that’s both funny and emotional. There are so many things like that throughout the movie. It was always about looking for the levity and the heart.”
15.Early on in the process of making the movie, Margot met with Mattel, the company that produces Barbie, to get them on board with the movie's themes and jokes.
"In that very first meeting, we impressed upon Ynon [Kreiz, Mattel CEO] we are going to honor the legacy of your brand, but if we don’t acknowledge certain things — if we don’t say it, someone else is going to say it,” she said. “So you might as well be a part of that conversation.” Though unfortunately, in a recent interview with Mattel Films' Robbie Brenner, he doesn't believe Barbie is a feminist movie.
16.Barbie's pink Corvette is drivable, but not by the person in the front seat. An operator drove the car remotely using a VR headset, that way Margot could sing and dance as much as she wanted without worrying about driving, too.
Nico Ferrari, who worked on all the cars in the movie, explained, "Nothing on the car is ‘off the shelf.' Everything, including the chassis and the body had to be custom made. There are no components from an existing car on the Barbie car we built. It wasn't possible to use anything from a real world car as it would all be too big! The Barbie car is 23% smaller than the original Corvette, so the whole car had to be drawn, manufactured, and installed to create the finished piece!"
17.Richard Dickson, Mattel president and COO, even flew to Barbie's filming location in London because of a scene he felt was off-brand for the company. Margot and Greta had to reenact it for him so he would change his mind.
“When you look on the page, the nuance isn’t there, the delivery isn’t there,” she explained.
18.Margot hosted a sleepover for all the Barbies before filming started. The Kens were invited to stop by or call, but they weren't invited to stay overnight.
Margot and her husband Tom Ackerley would also host movie nights for the cast and crew.
19.Margot instituted a dress code where everyone had to wear pink one day out of the week, and if someone wasn't wearing the color, she'd go around and collect a fine that would be donated to charity.
20.A lot of Barbie's clothes were made by costume designer Jacqueline Durran, but anything she didn't make was Chanel.
Margot's been an ambassador for Chanel since 2018.
21.Simu Liu waxed his entire body to play Ken, “Waxing has been an education to say the least,” he said. “It was one of the most painful experiences of my life. I have such a newfound admiration for the incredibly brave women who go through this on a monthly basis.”
22.Emma Mackey was originally cast in the movie because Margot and Greta really wanted to make a joke about how Emma and Margot look alike. But once they got into costume, they realized they didn't look too similar anymore, so the joke got cut.
"I've been getting told for years that I look like the girl from Sex Education, who is Emma Mackey," Margot said. "She plays one of the Barbies in the movie pretty much because Greta and I thought it would be funny. We were gonna do this whole joke about us looking similar."
23.Margot left presents for Ryan every day of filming, and they were all beach related, because Ken's job is beach, of course.
“She left a pink present with a pink bow, from Barbie to Ken, every day while we were filming" he said. "They were all beach-related… Because Ken’s job is just beach. I’ve never quite figured out what that means. But I felt like she was trying to help Ken understand, through these gifts that she was giving.”
24.Greta gifted Michael Cera a picture disc of NSYNC’s No Strings Attached, which is even more special now knowing that in the movie his character explains that all of NSYNC were actually Allans.
25.Greta Gerwig said that Ken's fascination with horses stemmed from his confusion about the concept as a whole. In Ken's mind, he thinks the horses are running the show.
She told IMDB, "[Barbie and Ken] really are in some ways like aliens visiting from another planet. And I liked just his confusion about like, you wouldn't necessarily know who's in charge. Like, maybe the horses are running more than you think, because there's an awful lot of, like, horses in statues, and horses in paintings — and you ride horses. You wouldn't immediately know, like, well, the rider is the one doing it."
26.During the movie's promotion cycle, several Barbie collabs came out including a bookable Barbie Dreamhouse Airbnb, Barbie-themed XBox controllers, a $1,350 Balmain cropped hoodie, and SO much more. The marketing budget is estimated to be over $150 million.
This would be in addition to the movie's $145 million production budget, too.
27.And finally, Margot begged Greta to incorporate Aqua's iconic "Barbie Girl," which led to the remix of the song by Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice.
“I was like, ‘Greta, how are we going to incorporate this song? We can’t do a Barbie movie and not have a nod to Aqua’s "Barbie Girl." It has to be in there.’ And [Greta] was like, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to find a cool way to incorporate it,’” Margot said. “And then, when she was like, ‘Guess who’s going to do the remix of Aqua’s 'Barbie Girl'? Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice.’ I was like, ‘Together? Are you joking?!’ I just knew immediately that all my girlfriends were going to lose their minds."
And, come hang out with everyone else who is screaming, crying, and throwing up about Barbie in BuzzFeed’s iOS app. Heck, even Allan is there.
