I Knew She Had Something

I am very good at spotting talent once it has made several successful films.

Show me an early appearance by somebody famous and I will notice things. The ease. The timing. The way the other people seem to be waiting for her to say something. I can become quite exact about qualities I might have spent the original broadcast getting up to find a biscuit.

This is one of my cheaper pleasures. I don’t have to like the film star’s latest film. I can go back and approve of her before the trouble began.

Now there is a machine-assisted way to arrange the opportunity. In the Guardian on October 25, Ima Caldwell reports that old episodes of Neighbours are being recut into short, upright episodes for phones, initially centred on Margot Robbie. RoseBerry Media is using its RedSnapper workflow to turn two storylines involving her character, Donna Freedman, into about 150 minutes of material for its Epis platform. Robbie played Donna from 2008 to 2011.

I haven’t watched the recut. I have, however, understood whom I am supposed to notice.

This is not, according to Fremantle, the company behind the soap, a synthetic Margot Robbie. Its spokesperson says the project uses original broadcast footage, dialogue and performances. No generated scenes, altered faces or synthetic voices. AI helps with catalogue analysis, editing and vertical reframing; a human editor reviews and approves every stage.

Good. I don’t want a computer’s idea of what a young star ought to have done. I want what she did when she was young.

That seems a perfectly honest appetite until I reach the word star.

She wasn’t being employed to play a future famous actress. She was playing Donna. The other actors were playing the other people in Donna’s life, and people elsewhere in the same programme had things happening to them which did not require Donna at all. A soap can keep several troubles alive at once. Sometimes the person I find tiresome is getting married. Sometimes the one I like has vanished for an episode. Nobody has consulted my schedule.

The new project’s announced centre is a person whose later success I already know. That doesn’t tell me which shots have been dropped or whether the new version works. It does give me an unusual advantage as an early admirer. I have been spared the early part.

If I say she stands out, she has been selected to stand there.

I can enjoy that. I have no objection to an old performance being available again. A decent scene doesn’t become a crime because somebody puts it on a telephone. Nor was it necessary to invent AI before an editor could assemble the early work of a star. People have been doing that sort of thing for years, often with a narrator explaining that even then, the signs were there.

The signs are generally excellent once somebody has provided the answer.

But catalogue analysis is an interesting job to make easier. Thousands of episodes needn’t remain thousands of episodes to somebody looking for a sale. Find this person. Find her storylines. Prepare a new thing around her. The archive can answer a question asked with knowledge the people making those scenes didn’t have.

I begin wondering about the actors alongside her. Not whether they secretly resented her. I don’t know that. I wonder what I am doing when I look at their younger faces for evidence that they knew what was coming.

There she is beside you, I want to tell them.

They were there. I am the late arrival.

Matthew Werkmeister, who played Zeke Kinski in a love-triangle storyline alongside Robbie, told Caldwell he only learned about the deal when she approached him for comment. He was concerned about his image being used through AI on a platform he hadn’t consented to. The Guardian reports that any residuals will be paid to actors and writers according to their agreements. I haven’t seen those agreements.

I have arrived wanting a glimpse of somebody before she was famous. Here is somebody else from the same footage, having to find out what is happening to him now.

He is not a clue in her biography. He did the scene too.

What I cannot buy from the archive is the judgment I imagine I would have had when these careers were still open.

I would like that judgment very much. I would like to have been the man who noticed, who didn’t need the later films, who could watch an unfamiliar actress in the middle of the day’s television and understand.

Perhaps I would have noticed her. Perhaps I would have preferred somebody else. Perhaps the biscuit would have occupied me completely. There is no recovered episode which can put me back in front of an unknown future.

The performances can all be genuine. The advance notice belongs to me.

I expect I will still find the young Margot Robbie promising. I have the eye for it now. Put on any scene from 2009 and I will sit there with seventeen years of inside information, admiring my instincts.

Additional reporting: Margot Robbie’s ‘Neighbours’ Episodes to Be Recut Into a Microdrama by RoseBerry for Its Epis Platform (EXCLUSIVE) (Michael Schneider, September 28, 2026).

Source: Neighbours is being recut into a microdrama focused on Margot Robbie – and her co-stars aren’t happy