If you thought I, Tonya was going to be a sanctimonious biopic about a troubled figure skater, the first full-length trailer should dispel that notion pretty quickly. In the NSFW trailer for the film, which hits theaters Dec. 8, Margot Robbie fully embodies Tonya Harding, proclaiming “There’s no such thing as truth” and explaining that Americans only want two kinds of athletes: someone to love or someone to hate. Guess which camp Harding falls into?
The Tonya Harding story has been told onscreen before, and many actresses have stepped into the role, but never with such gleeful abandon as Robbie shows in the trailer, where it’s very fun to watch her wig out, firing a shotgun in a kitchen and telling a panel of judges to “suck my dick.” Allison Janney gets in on the action too as Harding’s chain-smoking, domineering mother LaVona, who calls another parent a “cunt” in front of a bunch of skating children.
Of course, it would be impossible to make a biopic about Harding without including the Nancy Kerrigan incident, in which Harding’s ex-husband and her bodyguard (played here by Sebastian Stan and Paul Walter Hauser, respectively) hired Shane Stant to injure Kerrigan’s leg during the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in 1994. Harding’s career was derailed, and she was banned from the U.S. Figure Skating Association for life after pleading guilty to hindering the prosecution over the incident, but she has maintained all these years that she was not involved in its planning.
“Who would do that to a friend?” wonders Robbie-as-Harding in the trailer. Who indeed?
