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Vogue just turned a beauty tutorial into the creepiest monologue in movie history.
In May 2016, Vogue dropped an original short titled “Margot Robbie’s Beauty Routine Is Psychotically Perfect,” timed to the 25-year-old Australian actress’s June 2016 cover story. It looks, for about ten seconds, like every other celebrity morning-routine video the magazine has ever produced. Then Robbie opens her mouth, and it becomes something else entirely: a shot-for-shot spoof of Christian Bale’s opening monologue from American Psycho.
- Directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, produced by Supermarché in association with Moxie Pictures, with fashion styling by Felicia Garcia-Rivera.
- The short deliberately mimics Patrick Bateman’s 2000 bathroom-mirror speech from American Psycho, right down to the deadpan narration and clinical detachment.
- Robbie’s fictional regimen includes waking up with a naturally occurring six-pack, applying placenta face cream, peeling off a clear plastic mask, and meditating in an ice-cold eye pack.
A Parody Built on a Cult Classic
Anyone who has seen American Psycho recognizes the source material instantly. Bale’s Bateman stands at his sink reciting an ice-pack-and-moisturizer ritual with the flat, unnerving precision of a man reading a hostage script — and Vogue’s writers lifted that cadence almost word for word. Schulman and Joost, the directing duo behind found-footage horror hits like Catfish and Paranormal Activity 3 and 4, were an unusual but pointed choice to helm a “beauty” video; their job wasn’t to make skincare look aspirational, it was to make it look unsettling.
Robbie plays it dead straight. There’s no wink to camera, no cutaway gag — just the same narcissistic, clenched-jaw delivery Bateman used to describe his own “morning routine” before an axe murder. That commitment is the entire joke.
Robbie Clarifies Her Stance
The narration spoofs Bateman’s obsession with physical perfection almost line for line, except Robbie’s character claims to wake up already sporting a six-pack she did nothing to earn. From there the routine escalates into treatments no dermatologist would recommend: placenta-based face cream, a clear plastic peel-off mask, and a stretch of silent meditation behind an ice-cold eye pack, all delivered with the same eerie calm Bateman brought to his ice-pack line in the original film.
Robbie delivers the whole thing with Bateman’s exact deadpan menace — a beauty routine performed like a confession.
It’s a sharp bit of writing precisely because it refuses to soften the source. Vogue could have played the American Psycho callback for a quick laugh and moved on; instead the short commits to the bit for its full runtime, letting the mismatch between glossy beauty-brand packaging and Bateman’s psychopathic monotone do the work.
Vogue Justifies Its Editorial Strategy
Robbie’s June 2016 cover story arrived at a moment when her profile had shot up fast — The Wolf of Wall Street, then Suicide Squad on the way, gave Vogue an actress with genuine crossover heat and a willingness to be in on a joke at her own expense. A straight beauty-routine video would have been forgettable; a parody that makes fun of the entire “flawless celebrity morning ritual” genre, using one of cinema’s most quotable psychopaths as the template, is the kind of thing that gets passed around rather than skimmed past. For readers used to earnest tips on skincare layering — the sort covered in pieces like 8 Beauty Tips / Hacks I ACTUALLY Swear By! — the gag lands harder because it knows exactly what it’s mocking.
It also plays into a broader trend of actors leaning into self-parody for press cycles, rather than the stiff, on-message interview format. Robbie’s willingness to go full Bateman, rather than just laugh about the comparison in an interview, is what separated this from a standard junket clip.
The Real vs. the Fictional Robbie
None of the treatments described in the short are real recommendations — there’s no actual placenta cream regimen or six-pack-by-birthright claim attached to Robbie’s genuine skincare habits. The video is comedy first, and Vogue never presents it as service journalism. Readers looking for legitimate routines, rather than Bateman-style horror-comedy, are better served by conventional roundups like 32 Genius Beauty Tips for Girls than by anything Robbie’s character rattles off here.
The short runs just a few minutes, but it did exactly what a June cover tie-in is supposed to do: get shared far past Vogue’s usual readership, on the strength of one dead-on American Psycho impression from an actress nobody expected to go there. Robbie’s actual cover story, and the Suicide Squad press tour that followed a few months later, gave the joke a longer shelf life than most one-off video gags ever get.
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