Barbie Cast Reveals How They Played With Their Barbies, And It Gets Odd

Throughout "Barbie," we're reminded, every so often, that despite the chasm between Barbie Land and the real world, people in the real world can influence what happens in Barbie Land. Considering that this is exactly what leads to Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) experiencing a very unexpected existential crisis, it makes sense that, in the lead-up to the film's release, some of its stars opened up about how they played with their own real Barbies.

Sitting down with Fandango for their Big Ticket interview, Kate McKinnon, who plays Weird Barbie in the movie, said, "I witnessed my sister and her friends do some stuff, with those Barbies, and I think we all did... it's imagination, it's a way of expressing your innermost desires, and things that you're exploring about yourself and about the world – it's a very good tool for children to have." Her co-star, Issa Rae, who portrays President Barbie, said she and her sister got pretty dark when it came to their treatment of their own Barbie dolls: "It was a tool of aggression too – like my sister had a My Size Barbie, and I don't know what it was but because maybe it was like, close to our size, we f***ed that Barbie up!"

Robbie, for her part, got philosophical about the whole thing, thinking about the larger implications of and critiques directed at Barbie as a concept. "Isn't it so crazy – humans are just so weird," Robbie said. They made a doll, and then they got mad at the doll. We're not going like 'oh, here's the things we should do better in the world,' we're kinda like 'Mm! You're doing this wrong and you're doing this wrong and you're doing this wrong!' It's a plastic doll, and we made it!"

We're told, right from the start of "Barbie," that the way the dolls move and exist in their feminist utopia is directly influenced by kids in the real world playing with dolls (and we're told that by none other than Dame Helen Mirren, who narrates a decent portion of the film). For example, Barbie doesn't take the stairs; she's lifted out of her house and into her car. So when Robbie's Barbie starts encountering issues like flat feet, irrepressible thoughts of death, and cellulite, Weird Barbie reveals that this is the result of a girl out in the real world who's having sort of a rough time. To fix it, Barbie has to trek to the real world and figure out where this girl is and why she's so blue.

That anger Robbie talked about, though? Barbie, beloved at home in Barbie Land, comes face to face with that anger in the form of Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), a teenager who tells Barbie that she's everything wrong with female culture. (Upon being called a fascist, Barbie tearfully muses to herself that she couldn't possibly be a fascist because she doesn't control the railways or the flow of commerce.) Not only that, but Barbie sees that, despite her previous beliefs, Barbie Land's matriarchal structure hasn't reproduced the same results in the real world... changing her entire perspective.

The best joke about actually playing with Barbies, though, is the mere existence of McKinnon's Weird Barbie. Banished to her own weird corner of Barbie Land that includes real-life discontinued Mattel toys like Taffy the pooping dog or Growing Up Skipper, Weird Barbie was, according to the other perfect Barbies, "played with too hard." We see a cut of exactly what happened to Weird Barbie, and that immediately makes sense — her hair was hacked off, her face is covered in marker scribbles, and her legs were bent into a split.

As Weird Barbie puts it later when Sasha and her mother Gloria (America Ferrera), she has weird hair, she's always in a split, and she "smells like basement." In fact, if you pay super close attention during that Weird Barbie origin-story flashback, you'll know a young Gloria is the one who made Weird Barbie who she is, as a wall decal spells out Gloria's name in the background. In any case, Weird Barbie's human-caused oddities set her apart in Barbie Land, and not always in a good way at first... but after the Barbies realize they've been unfair to her, she ends up getting a cabinet post alongside President Barbie. (She specifically requests sanitation.) In any case, it definitely seems like the "Barbie" cast brought their own Barbie memories to their roles.

"Barbie" is in theaters now.