It’s hard to believe that eleven years ago, Margot Robbie was a relatively unknown actress. Now a superstar known for her roles as Barbie and Harley Quinn (sorry Lady Gaga), Robbie has demonstrated quite a range. More than a decade later, not everyone remembers that her big break came from the provocative role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street in which she played opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in a few very spicy sex scenes.
Speaking to the Talking Pictures podcast, Robbie recently revealed that her famous (or infamous?) full-frontal nude scene in The Wolf of Wall Street didn’t come about because Scorsese wanted it. Rather, it was basically her idea.
“The whole point is that she’s going to come out completely naked—that’s the card she’s playing,” Robbie said of her character, Naomi Lapaglia, who was, based in part on real-life former model Nadine Macaluso. When Scorsese suggested that she could seduce Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) while wearing a robe, Robbie insisted that it would be more in keeping with her character to stride into the scene fully nude, and pushed for the scene to happen that way. “That’s not what she would do in that scene,” Robbie recalled saying in the interview.
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This wasn’t the only impact Robbie’s fierce personality had on The Wolf of Wall Street. She also explained that during an audition to get the role, she improvised the idea of smacking Jordan rather than kissing him.
“I thought, I could kiss Leonardo DiCaprio right now, and that would be awesome. I can’t wait to tell all of my friends this,” she recalled. “And then I thought… nah. And just walloped him in the face…they just burst out laughing. Leo and Marty were laughing so hard, they said ‘That was great.’ I was thinking, "I'm going to get arrested, I’m pretty sure that’s assault, battery.”
At the time, Robbie worried she had hit DiCaprio too hard in the face. But, as history has proven, she hit him exactly right.
