There wasn’t much Margot Robbie wasn’t willing to do for her breakthrough role in The Wolf of Wall Street. But there was one scene that Robbie had to have changed because she couldn’t nail it.
Margot Robbie didn’t think anyone would notice her in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’
Although the sci-fi romcom About Time was Robbie’s film debut, it was The Wolf of Wall Street that turned her into an A-lister. The role of a lifetime came as an initial shock to her. At the time, even her own team doubted Robbie’s chances of scoring the Martin Scorsese flick.
“I said, ‘If I was a dude, I’d wanna be in this, but I’ve got no interest in playing a gold-digger mistress.’ And my managers said, ‘Okay, Margot, that’s great, but it’s a Scorsese film. We’re obviously not expecting you to get this role,’” Robbie once told Vulture.
However, Scorsese was impressed enough by Robbie’s performance to have her screen for the feature in person. Afterward, Robbie famously won the role by slapping her co-star Leonardo DiCaprio in the face during her audition.
Her celebrity profile quickly blossomed after the role. But this might have also been surprising Robbie, who expected to be completely overshadowed by DiCaprio.
“I know this sounds silly now, knowing how big the movie became, but at the time I was like, ‘No one’s gonna notice me in this film. It doesn’t matter what I do in this film because they’re gonna focus on Leo and I’ll just slip under the radar,’” she recently told BAFTA (via Mirror).
Margot Robbie refused to do this impossible ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ scene
There were many scenes in Wolf of Wall Street that Robbie helped make iconic. Perhaps one of the movie’s most memorable moments was when Robbie’s character seduces DiCaprio in a nursery room. While doing so, she pokes the heels of her stiletto shoes into DiCaprio’s face to stop him from touching her and further tease him. That particular take, however, was the result of Robbie refusing to do the scene how it was originally written.
Initially, Robbie was supposed to pull aside her underwear in the scene using her stiletto heel. As soon as she saw the scene in the script, however, she knew the scene wasn’t doable.
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“I remember thinking when I read it, ‘That’s just impossible,’” Robbie once said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
Practicing the scene on her own time just confirmed her initial instincts.
“I was like, ‘No, I’m right, that is absolutely impossible,’” she remembered thinking.
Robbie would later discard that take entirely and improvise the stiletto scene that made it into the film’s final cut. Still, Robbie found the entire seduction scene in general to be a bit humiliating.
“It doesn’t come across when you’re watching the movie, but in reality we’re in a tiny bedroom with 30 crew crammed in,” she said in an interview with Porter. “All men. And for 17 hours I’m pretending to be touching myself. It’s just a very weird thing and you have to bury the embarrassment and absurdity, really deep, and fully commit.”
The ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ scene Margot Robbie regretted filming
Generally, Robbie had an unforgettable and enjoyable time on the set of the Scorsese feature. But there was one scene Robbie did that she advised others to avoid doing in real life. It involved her and her co-star making love on a pile of money.
“I got a million paper cuts on my back from all that money,” Robbie once said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. If anyone is ever planning on having sex on top of a pile of cash: don’t. Or maybe real money is a bit softer, but the fake money is like paper, and when I got up off the bed, I turned around to get my robe and everyone gasped. I said, ‘What is it?’ And they said, ‘You look like you’ve been whipped a million times. Your back is covered in a thousand red scratches.’”
