Margot Robbie appeared on the “Talking Pictures” podcast with TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz and revealed that her “Wolf of Wall Street” director Martin Scorsese actually offered her the chance not to appear fully nude in the film. Robbie has a full frontal scene as Naomi Lapaglia, the bombshell and no-nonsense wife to Leonardo DiCaprio’s criminal Jordan Belfort. The actor was in her early 20s at the time and wasn’t even thinking about how “everyone is going to see this.”
“[Scorsese] said, ‘Maybe you can be wearing a robe if you’re not comfortable.’ But that’s not what she would do in that scene,” Robbie said of her character and making the choice herself to go full frontal. “The whole point is that she’s going to come out completely naked—that’s the card she’s playing right now.”
Robbie took matters into her own hands during a lot of the making of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which served as her breakout film role. For instance, the scenes for her audition with DiCaprio ended with their characters kissing, but she decided to slap him instead.
“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.’ And then I thought nah. And just walloped him in the face,” Robbie said. “It was dead silent for what felt like an eternity but was probably three seconds.”
“They just burst out laughing. Leo and Marty were laughing so hard. They said, ‘That was great,’” Robbie remembered. I was thinking, ‘I’m going to get arrested, I’m pretty sure that’s assault or battery. Not only will you never work again, actually you will go to jail for this, you idiot.’ And also why did you have to hit him so hard? You should have done it lighter.”
“The Wolf of Wall Street” was Robbie’s first major film role and opened in the 2013, the same year she had a smaller supporting role in the romance drama “About Time.” She’d reunite with co-star DiCaprio six years later on Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
Listen to Robbie’s full interview on the “Talking Pictures” podcast here.