Ever since she was a little girl, Tonya Harding was pushed to her limits. At least that’s the angle shown in I, Tonya. The Red Band trailer was released on Wednesday, November 1, showing Margot Robbie in the iconic, yet very troubling, role.
“I was the best figure skater in the world at one point in time,” Robbie’s Harding says in the new trailer. In a glance at her days as a child skater, Harding’s mother LaVona Golden (played by Alison Janney) is less than pleasant.
“You call that a clean skate for Christ’s sake?” her mom yells at her from the stands, causing other parents to ask her not to curse in front of the children. “I didn’t swear you c—t,” she answers. That attitude persists through the entire trailer — and Harding clearly takes after her, flipping off adults as a little kid.
At one point, her mother tells Harding she “skates like a graceless bull dyke,” and later, throws a knife at her.
“When I was a kid did you ever love me?” an adult Harding asks her mother at a diner.
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“I made you a champion knowing you’d hate me for it. That’s the sacrifice a mother makes,” Golden answers.
The new promo also gives an inside look at Harding’s relationship with Jeff Gillooly, played by Sebastian Stan. From the moment they met to Harding’s downfall and everything in between, Gillooly stood by her.
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And then there’s the attack. The trailer shows a split second of someone, seemingly Harding, beating someone else, seemingly Nancy Kerrigan, with a baseball bat. “I mean come on, what kind of friggin’ person bashes in their friend’s knee?” Harding asks, looking directly in the camera. “Who would do that to a friend?”
I, Tonya hits theaters on Friday, December 8.
