Margot Robbie Joins A24’s The Week of Pain From The Drama Director Kristoffer Borgli

Margot Robbie is headed to A24. The Barbie star will lead The Week of Pain, the next feature from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, the filmmaker behind this year’s surprise hit The Drama. Deadline first reported the news on November 13, and Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and IndieWire have since confirmed it. It will be Robbie’s first starring role in an A24 film.

What is The Week of Pain about?

Nobody is saying yet. As with Borgli’s earlier projects, plot details are being kept under wraps, and Robbie’s character hasn’t been described. The title alone hints at the kind of uncomfortable, darkly funny territory Borgli is known for. His films tend to put ordinary people through extraordinary social humiliation: a woman who fakes an illness for attention in Sick of Myself, a professor who suddenly appears in strangers’ dreams in Dream Scenario, and an engaged couple unraveled by a confession in The Drama.

Who is making The Week of Pain?

• Writer-director: Kristoffer Borgli
• Star: Margot Robbie (the only cast member announced so far)
• Financing and production: A24
• Producers: Square Peg (Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen), Dilemma Films and Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment
• Filming: planned for 2027, according to Deadline
• Release date: not announced

Why A24 is betting on Borgli again

The numbers explain a lot. The Drama, starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, opened in April and went on to earn about $134 million worldwide, making it one of A24’s highest-grossing films ever, according to The Hollywood Reporter and IndieWire. That’s a big number for an original, R-rated black comedy, and it turned Borgli from an arthouse provocateur into a director who can attract top-tier stars.

The Week of Pain will be his third A24 and Square Peg collaboration, after Dream Scenario with Nicolas Cage in 2023 and The Drama this year. Deadline reports that Robbie had been a fan of Borgli’s work for some time and the two had discussed working together before she formally signed on.

Margot Robbie’s busy slate

Robbie was most recently seen in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights for Warner Bros., and she’s finishing work on the Ocean’s prequel set around a heist at the 1962 Monaco Grand Prix. Through LuckyChap, she’s also produced Promising Young Woman, Saltburn and Barbie, which earned her a Best Picture nomination as a producer.

Pairing one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars with a director who loves to make audiences squirm is exactly the kind of swing that has defined A24. It’s also a sign of how much the studio’s biggest bets now rely on star power, as we saw with Julianne Moore in The Debut. Expect casting news to follow in 2027.

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Sources: Deadline, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire.