Tayyaba
Long before Margot Robbie got all up in the ‘Barbie’ scene and had Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach write the screenplay, Amy Schumer was the one chosen to headline the project. In 2016, Sony acquired the rights to the film and cast Amy. Less than a year after that she dropped out, and provided a seemingly legit reason as to why she did that to Variety at the time. Now she confirms that it was false, and that there was an entirely different reason to it.
Why did Amy Schumer leave ‘Barbie’?
It turns out that “scheduling conflicts”, which was the reason she originally used, was just a cover. During a new interview on ‘Watch What Happens Live’ Schumer admitted that it was actually “creative differences” that drove her off the movie. She mentioned that the script wasn’t “feminist and cool” enough for her back then. Schumer mentioned last year that Sony “definitely didn’t want to do it the way I wanted to do it, the only way I was interested in doing it.” Aside from that, she joked that she should have known the project wasn’t for her when the studio gifted her a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes to celebrate her casting, a stylish and unintentionally insulting gift that showed Schumer exactly what Sony executives thought about women.
“I can’t wait to see the [Margot Robbie] movie, it looks awesome. I think we said it was scheduling conflicts, that’s what we said. But yeah, it really was just creative differences. But you know, there’s a new team behind it, and it looks like it’s very feminist and cool so I will be seeing the movie.”
Amy Schumer
What happened to ‘Barbie’ after Schumer left?
The ‘Barbie’ project ultimately ended up moving from Sony to Warner Bros after Margot Robbie got on board and secured the rights through Mattel. She then got Greta Gerwig and Baumbach to pen the screenplay all over again, with Gerwig later moving up as the director. Warner Bros is opening the film officially on July 21 nationwide starring Margot Robbie herself and Ryan Gosling.