Before ‘Barbie’: Margot Robbie’s Cebu photos resurface amid movie success

August 1, 2023 - 5:28 PM
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Margot Robbie and her friends with Elisabet Hansen during volunteer work in Cebu in October 2015 (riseabovecebu/Facebook)

Before her role as the human adaptation of the Barbie doll, Margot Robbie volunteered in a non-government organization in the Philippines.

Photos of Margot’s volunteer work circulated on social media late July amid the recent success of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” the movie, where she played the titular role.

A Reddit user on July 27 posted some of these pictures on the subreddit r/Philippines. They showed Margot cooking with her friends and some Filipino volunteers in Cebu.

“Back in 2015, Margot Robbie volunteered in Cebu by cooking meals for underprivileged kids,” the post reads.

The post had since garnered 3,800 upvotes on the forum.

Back in 2015, Margot Robbie volunteered in Cebu by cooking meals for the underprivileged kids.
by u/stembuds in Philippines

These snapshots also made their way to Twitter on July 26. A Twitter user shared the ones that showed Margot cutting Baguio beans and pouring them into a large pot.

The tweet had since garnered 10,000 retweets, 2,873 quotes, and 99,000 likes so far.

These photos came from the Facebook album of a non-government organization called Rise Above Foundation Cebu.

Margot and her friends helped prepare food and feed poor children with them in October 2015.

Elisabet Hansen, the project manager of the organization, uploaded notable moments of this activity on her Facebook account.

It was then shared on the NGO’s official Facebook account.

In Elisabet’s post, she detailed that Margot and her friends helped them prepare and serve lugaw for the kids at the community center.

The snapshots also showed them having fun and bonding with the children.

Elisabet also recalled there she met Margot, who also starred as Harley Quinn in “Suicide Squad” at that time, and her friends by chance at the airport.

“I always enjoy having young people join us in our programs. From a meeting at the airport in Manila, and realizing we all were going to Cebu, to meeting up today for a fun time preparing food for, cooking and serving children from the slum area bordering to our Rise Above Community Center,” she said.

In 2016, Margot also reminisced about this experience in an interview.

She shared that it was a backpacking trip with her friends to several places in the Philippines.

Margot said that during a bus ride, they happened to talk with a woman who was doing charity work for children in need in Cebu.

“It was by far my favorite country I have visited. The Philippines has every kind of experience, and the people was so gracious and so beautiful,” the Australian actress said in the interview.

Before “Barbie,” Margot was also a main star in “The Suicide Squad,” “Birds of Prey,” “Z for Zachariah,” “The Legend of Tarzan” and “I, Tonya.”