I, Tonya Trivia: 20 interesting facts you didn’t know about the film!

I, Tonya is a 2017 American biographical sports black comedy film directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Steven Rogers. Let’s see some amazing facts and trivia about it!

1. The film stars Margot Robbie as figure skater Tonya Harding and Sebastian Stan as Jeff Gillooly, alongside Julianne Nicholson, Bobby Cannavale, Caitlin Carver, and Allison Janney in supporting roles. The plot tells the story of the 1994 attack on Nancy Kerrigan, Harding’s Olympic teammate.

2. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 87% based on 53 reviews, with an average rating of 7.6/10.

3. The site’s critical consensus reads, “Led by strong work from Margot Robbie and Alison Janney, I, Tonya finds the humor in its real-life story without losing sight of its more tragic — and emotionally resonant — elements.”

4. On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score 76 out of 100, based 11 critics, indicating “generally favorable reviews.

5. Although a member of an amateur ice hockey league, Margot Robbie didn’t have that much skating experience before taking on the role of Tonya Harding.

6. Margot Robbie trained with choreographer Sarah Kawahara for the role.

7. Although she trained for the role, she wouldn’t be able to do Tonya’s triple axel as very few people in the world are able to and at least two of them were training for the Olympics. The choreography was done and the scenes were completed with the help of visual effects and CGI.

8. Steven Rogers’ script was featured on the 2016 Black List of the most-liked scripts of the year.

9. Tonya Harding served as a consultant on the film.

10. Writer Steven Rogers, a long-time friend of Allison Janney, wrote the role of LaVona Golden with Janney in mind. He’d written several roles for Janney in the past, but other actresses ended up getting those parts.

11. When Tonya Harding herself first saw the film, she particularly liked the “Suck my dick!” line. She told Margot Robbie that she wished she had actually said that in real life.

12. Tonya Harding was born on November 12, 1970 in Portland, Oregon, to LaVona Golden and Alan Harding.

13. Harding was raised in Portland, and began skating at age three.As a youth, Harding also hunted, drag raced, and learned car mechanics from her father. Her mother, who struggled to help support the family while working as a waitress, hand-sewed Harding’s skating costumes for competitions.

14. Tonya Harding began working her way up the competitive skating ladder in the mid-1980s, placing sixth at the 1986 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, fifth in 1987 and 1988, and third in 1989.

15. She was considered a strong contender at the 1990 U.S. Figure Skating Championships after having won Skate America 1989, but she had a poor free skate as a result of suffering from the flu and asthma, and dropped from second place after the original program to finish seventh overall.

16. While she was a powerful free skater, she typically had lower placements in the compulsory figures.

17. On January 6, 1994, Harding’s main team competitor Nancy Kerrigan was attacked by assailant Shane Stant after a practice session at the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit. Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and her bodyguard, Shawn Eckhardt, hired Stant to break Kerrigan’s right leg so that she would be unable to compete at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer.

18. After failing to find Kerrigan at her training rink in Massachusetts, Stant followed her to Detroit.

19. When she stepped off the ice after a practice session at Cobo Arena and walked behind a nearby curtain into a corridor, Stant struck her on the thigh a few inches above the knee with an ASP telescopic baton. Her leg was only bruised, not broken, but the injury forced her to withdraw from the national championship. Harding won that event, and she and Kerrigan were both selected for the 1994 Olympic team.

20. Tonya Harding finished eighth in Lillehammer, while Kerrigan, by then fully recovered from the injury, won the silver medal behind Oksana Baiul from Ukraine.