Margot Robbie has picked her next oddball: she will star in The Week of Pain, the new film from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, the man behind this year’s Zendaya and Robert Pattinson hit The Drama. A24 is financing and producing, according to reports confirmed on Thursday, November 13.
The producing line-up is stacked. Alongside A24 sits Square Peg, the company run by Hereditary director Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen, plus Dilemma Films and Robbie’s own LuckyChap Entertainment, the company she co-founded in 2014 with Tom Ackerley, Sophia Kerr and Josey McNamara. No plot details have been shared, and no other cast has been named.
Who is Kristoffer Borgli?
Borgli, born in Oslo in 1985, worked in a video store as a teenager before he started making films. His career so far reads like a steady climb:
- DRIB (2017): his first feature, billed as a real documentary about a fake energy drink.
- Sick of Myself (2022): a pitch-black comedy about a woman who craves attention, which grossed about $1.1 million worldwide.
- Dream Scenario (2023): Nicolas Cage as a dull professor who suddenly appears in millions of strangers’ dreams, a role that drew Oscar buzz but no nomination.
- The Drama (2026): his A24 film with Zendaya and Pattinson, released in April.
Reports put The Drama at $135 million worldwide on a $28 million budget. If those figures hold, it earned back its budget almost five times over, and took in roughly 120 times what Sick of Myself made four years earlier. That kind of jump explains why a star of Robbie’s size is now coming to him.
Borgli also briefly worked on an HBO series based on Bret Easton Ellis’s novel The Shards, before leaving the project in 2025, and he has another feature, The Damage, in development.
Where Robbie’s run stands
The casting comes as Robbie, 36, balances giant studio films with smaller, stranger ones. Her last release was Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, opposite Jacob Elordi, which opened on February 13, 2026, and which she also produced. Reports say it took $241 million worldwide.
Her slate is crowded. She is attached to an Ocean’s Eleven prequel directed by and co-starring Bradley Cooper, which she has said is set around a heist at the 1962 Monaco Grand Prix, and she is set to produce and star in Tim Burton’s remake of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman for Warner Bros.
Pairing her with Borgli fits a long pattern. Robbie used LuckyChap to back left-field projects such as I, Tonya, Promising Young Woman and Saltburn even while playing Harley Quinn and Barbie, whose 2023 film passed $1.4 billion worldwide.
A24’s year of auteur bets
A24 and its partners have had a busy fall. Badiyaa covered Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, with Julianne Moore as a method-acting housewife, and more film and TV news is on our Entertainment page.
No shooting dates or release window for The Week of Pain have been confirmed by A24. Robbie’s next confirmed big-screen job remains the Cooper-directed Ocean’s prequel.
Further reading
Image: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
