The audition that nearly derailed Margot Robbie’s career: “The room just went dead silent”
Hollywood is full of talented young hopefuls with perfectly symmetrical faces and an abundance of determination, which makes it challenging to stand out from the crowd. There is plenty of luck involved, of course, but there is also something to be said for taking luck into your own hands by ensuring that you make yourself unforgettable. Margot Robbie was more than up to the task. In fact, she was so up to the task that she almost went too far.
Before she was a multi-time Oscar nominee and movie star-turned-super producer, Robbie was a Hollywood newcomer trying to break into the business. She began her career in the Australian soap opera Neighbours before landing a role in the US television series Pan Am in 2011. However, getting her big break in movies took a little more time, and when she landed an audition for Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street and found herself in a room with the director and Leonardo DiCaprio, Robbie decided she needed to take a big swing. Literally.
In the film, DiCaprio plays a real-life Wall Street tycoon who went to prison for rampant fraud and corruption. Robbie was auditioning for the role of his wife, a character who seems like nothing more than a trophy wife but who turns out to be even savvier than he is.
Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar in 2017, Robbie remembered being in the room with the star and director and realising that she had to make an impression quickly. “In my head I was like, ‘You have literally 30 seconds left in this room and if you don’t do something impressive nothing will ever come of it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance, just take it.’ And so I start screaming at him and he’s yelling back at me. And he’s really scary. I can barely keep up.”
At the end of the scene, DiCaprio said something along the lines of, “You should be happy to have a husband like me. Now get over here and kiss me.” Most actors in that situation would do exactly as he instructed. He might have been performing a role, but he is Leonardo DiCaprio, after all. But Robbie went a different direction.
“I walk up really close to his face and then I’m like, ‘Maybe I should kiss him,'” she recalled, “‘When else am I ever going to get a chance to kiss Leo DiCaprio, ever?’ But another part of my brain clicks and I just go, Whack! I hit him in the face. And then I scream, ‘F**k you!'”
It wasn’t in the script. “The room just went dead silent,” she remembered, “And I froze.”
You could imagine things going very badly from there. She could have been hauled away by security for assaulting one of Hollywood’s biggest stars and blacklisted from the industry. Instead, she was offered the job on the spot. According to Scorsese, it was the slap that did it.
“She clinched her part in The Wolf of Wall Street during our first meeting by hauling off and giving Leonardo DiCaprio a thunderclap of a slap on the face,” the director said. “[It was] an improvisation that stunned us all.”
Given how famous Robbie is now, it would be easy to overlook what a gutsy move this actually was. She was nowhere close to a household name at the time, and the part she was auditioning for was small. You could easily imagine another actor doing it and being completely forgettable in the role, but Robbie gave a ferocious, unpredictable performance that turned her into a star despite her brief screen time.
