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The movie repeatedly highlights how Mary of Scots and Elizabeth I dealt aesthetically and personally with health and beauty issues as they related to their appearances as rulers. Early on, we see how Ronan and her servants react to and clean up after her period comes early, and the pictures above are taken from a scene set after Robbie recovers from an awful case of smallpox. As she ages, the scars left from the illness get worse and worse, and she applies more and more white makeup to hide them as the movie progresses. In the climactic scene of the movie (the only scene with the two leads together), a one-on-one conversation between the two leads, Robbie talks about how she personally prepared for them to meet by commissioning an elaborate outfit and wig with excessive makeup so as not to "destroy" Ronan's image of her, and one gets the sense that the rivalry of the two queens was motivated just as much by Robbie's professional and personal jealousy of Ronan as a leader/woman as much as it was motivated by the rivalry between nations. Now, this doesn't exactly work in the movie as I think it was intended, since Ronan doesn't sell admirable confidence in the same way that Robbie sells a lack thereof (and this is why I think her performance is flawed), but there's a lot more going on here than an unpleasant costume drama catfight (cough cough, The Favourite), and, to directly address some comments made about Robbie's appearance in the pictures above, she's deliberately made ugly for much of this movie not to caricature her or for the sake of shallow jokes, but in the service of larger points regarding her character as a ruler and a person.