More than 10 years after her breakout performance in The Wolf of Wall Street, Margot Robbie is taking credit for her full-frontal debut.
Although director Martin Scorsese said she could wear a robe if it made her more comfortable, the 3x Oscar nominee revealed it was her idea to strip down completely nude for one memorable scene of her character Naomi seducing wealthy stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio).
“That’s not what she would do in that scene,” she explained on the Talking Pictures podcast. “The whole point is that she’s going to come out completely naked—that’s the card she’s playing.”
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Robbie wasn’t afraid to go for it in the presence of Hollywood titans like Scorsese and DiCaprio, noting she made the creative decision to slap the latter in her final audition, when the scene called for a kiss.
“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,” she recalled.
“It was dead silence for what felt like an eternity but was probably three seconds,” added Robbie. “Then 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.”
The actress imagined berating, “‘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.'”
Robbie previously revealed that she also came up with the idea for Naomi and Jordan to have sex one last time before she tells him she wants a divorce, noting that Scorsese was easy to talk to about suggested script revisions.
“We were a couple of months into the shoot at that point,” she recalled in 2022. “The tone had been set that it was a bit of a free for all. It was like the crazier you are, the more Marty will like it. And the more screen time you’re going to get.”
Robbie added, “We spoke all the time. I’d sit at video village, and he would tell stories about the Mafia and old film stars, but he didn’t actually give direction.”