According to the magazine’s contributing editor Rich Cohen, “Australia is America 50 years ago, sunny and slow, a throwback.
“They still live and die with the plot turns of soap operas in Melbourne and Perth, still dwell in a single mass market in Adelaide and Sydney,” he adds.
“In the morning, they watch Australia’s Today show. In other words, it’s just like America, only different. When everyone here is awake, everyone there is asleep, which makes it a perfect perch from which to study our customs, habits, accents.”
The star of the new film The Legend of Tarzan is described as “having a lost kind of purity”. But the writer goes on to say that she does not talk much about her upbringing as she does not like to perpetuate Australian stereotypes.
After which, Rich writes she grew up in the Gold Coast hinterland where in the “hinterland of the hinterland” there really were “kangaroos and a dingo really will eat your baby”.
He then helpfully adds that the Gold Coast – Australia’s sixth largest city – is “seven thousand miles to Los Angeles”.
“When she talks about it, you see the arid country, the horizon on every side, blue sky, yellow fields,” he writes. The Gold Coast has a subtropical climate with beaches on one side of the city and rainforest on the other.
“People always want to know, ‘Did you have kangaroos outside your bedroom window?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, but none of my other friends did.’ Or ‘Did you have snakes running around?’ And again, ‘Yes, in our house, but this isn’t an Australian thing,’” Margot says in the story.
The profile then goes to talk at great length about the actor’s looks, repeatedly discussing whether she is like Audrey Hepburn, to whom the The Legend of Tarzan film producer Jerry Weintraub compared her.
“She is 26 and beautiful, not in that otherworldly, catwalk way but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance,” the story adds.
“She is blonde but dark at the roots. She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes.
“She can be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character. As I said, she is from Australia. To understand her, you should think about what that means.”