Margot Robbie Just Traded the Red Carpet for a Jasmine Field in Chanel’s New Fragrance Film, and the Photos Are Pure Magic

Forget the front row. On October 16, Margot Robbie showed up somewhere nobody expected: knee-deep in blooming jasmine on a hillside in Grasse, France, smiling down at a pile of freshly picked white blossoms with her hands in the dirt. No couture gown, no heels, no camera flashes. Just a simple black top, jeans, and the perfume capital of the world stretching out behind her.

The photos, shared online by Cinethology, are the first look at a new Chanel short film and photo series that sends Robbie to the source of the house’s most famous scent. Timed to the jasmine harvest, the project pairs her with Olivier Polge, Chanel’s in-house perfume creator, for a rare behind-the-scenes look at the flower fields where Chanel No. 5 begins. The film premiered with HERO and Heroine magazines, and Chanel also gave Who What Wear exclusive access to the short.

A Partnership Eight Years in the Making

Few celebrity partnerships feel as natural as Robbie and Chanel. She has served as a house ambassador since March 2018, and she was the last ambassador personally chosen by Karl Lagerfeld before his death. That alone puts her in rare company, and the campaigns she has fronted since have become events in their own right.

Earlier this year, she recreated Kylie Minogue’s Come Into My World music video for a Chanel 25 handbag spot directed by Michel Gondry, the same director who shot the original clip. The film showed multiple versions of Robbie moving across a Parisian sidewalk set, and fans loved the playful nostalgia of it. Before that, she was named the face of Chanel No. 5, following in the footsteps of Nicole Kidman, Catherine Deneuve and Marion Cotillard.

The No. 5 chapter launched in October 2024 with See You at 5, a short film directed by Luca Guadagnino and shot on 35mm, co-starring fellow Australian Jacob Elordi. It was a glamorous, cinematic introduction to her as the new muse of the world’s most famous perfume. The Grasse film is its earthy opposite, and that is exactly what makes it interesting.

The Most Precise Harvest in Fragrance

Grasse is not just a pretty backdrop. It is the birthplace of Chanel No. 5. Perfumer Ernest Beaux first chose jasmine from the region to compose the fragrance in 1921, and more than a century later the flower is still picked by hand for every bottle sold.

The process shown in the film is almost unbelievably precise. Every jasmine flower is harvested at dawn between August and October, then weighed and sent for extraction within three hours to preserve its scent. Only the petals are used. And a single 30 ml bottle can contain up to 1,000 individual blossoms, each one picked by hand.

The fragrance itself is a layered floral aldehyde composition, with notes that include jasmine, neroli, may rose and sandalwood. Seeing Robbie with her hands full of freshly picked petals gives that heritage a refreshingly human feel. It is one thing to know a famous scent has history. It is another to watch its face crouch down in the field and smell the work for herself.

What Fragrance Has to Do With Her Acting

The most revealing part of the film is not the scenery. It is the conversation between Robbie and Polge about how they both work. She compared the craft of a perfumer and an actress as two forms of emotional storytelling, then shared something fans rarely get to hear about her process: “I find it really helpful to pick a fragrance for every character I play.”

Think about that for a second. Before she steps into a role, she chooses a scent. It is the kind of detail that makes you rewatch her performances and wonder what you were actually smelling on screen. She also described scent as deeply transportive, a feeling that fits a project built around memory, craft and place.

Robbie is famously private. She does not even keep an Instagram account, so glimpses of her off-duty self tend to travel far. The Grasse images show a softer, more intimate side of a star usually seen at premieres, trading couture for cotton and camera-ready poses for genuine curiosity about how things are made.

Capping Off a Very Stylish Year

The jasmine-field shoot caps a fashion-forward year for the 36-year-old. In March, she attended Chanel’s fall 2026 show in Paris after wrapping her Wuthering Heights press tour, debuting a new bob with fringe bangs that marked a sharp departure from the romantic waves she wore while promoting the film. At that same show, she wore sheer trompe l’oeil couture jeans from Chanel’s spring 2026 couture collection, carefully stitched to mimic classic denim.

Back in February, she wore head-to-toe Chanel at Tropfest in Australia. Compared with those polished runway moments, the Grasse imagery feels softer and more grounded. It is a fitting reminder that behind every iconic bottle lies an enormous amount of careful handwork, most of it done at dawn, by people whose names never make the credits.

Why This Little Film Matters

It would have been easy for Chanel to keep Robbie in front of a camera in Paris and call it a campaign. Instead, the house sent its biggest ambassador to the fields, put her next to the people who actually pick the flowers, and let the craft speak for itself. That choice says something about where luxury is heading: away from pure spectacle, toward the hands behind it.

For Robbie, it is also a quietly perfect fit. The actress who produced Barbie through her company LuckyChap Entertainment and helped turn it into a $1.4 billion phenomenon with eight Academy Award nominations has always cared about the machinery behind the magic. Now she is doing the same thing for perfume, one jasmine blossom at a time.

Further reading: Megan Thee Stallion, Charli XCX and Heidi Klum lit up the InStyle Imagemaker Awards red carpet, Cynthia Erivo stunned in yellow Prada at her London premiere, Pedro Pascal on the hardest role of his career at the London Film Festival.

Sources: Fiction Horizon, Comic Basics.