How acrylic nails helped Margot Robbie embody her ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ character
One of the brightest lights in the ever-changing world of Hollywood, Margot Robbie, has always seemed to dazzle audience members with his effortless brilliance, talent and dedication to the craft of acting. With a graceful charm and an authenticity that blooms from every scene, Robbie is rightfully championed as one of the film industry’s most luminous stars.
Robbie has played a wide variety of roles, from the vulnerable Tonya Harding in I, Tonya or the enigmatic Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad or even the larger-than-life version of Barbie in Greta Gerwig’s iconic movie. Quite simply, it seems like there’s no character that Robbie feels that she can’t put her talents to.
It all began for Robbie, though, with her appearance in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, where she played Naomi Lapaglia, the second wife of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort. Robbie was still fresh on the acting scene when she was featured in the 2013 film, but she seemed to have completely stolen the show.
In an interview with The New York Times, Robbie admitted that her character seemed “like a gold-digging slut, to be honest”. However, the actor’s coach, Nancy Banks, helped her develop the character properly and develop an outer-borough New York accent, which mostly arrive from a level of pretend sass post-nail bar.
Robbie noted, “She goes, ‘Pretend like you just had your nails painted’. And all of a sudden, like I’m talking like – Oh, I’m doing the accent, all because of the nails.” The result was that Robbie began to embody her character, mostly because of the way the nail made her physicality change completely.
“You end up doing everything differently,” she said. “You can’t tuck your hair back the way you would; you can’t wipe away tears the way you would because you’ve got nails that are an inch long. All your mannerisms change easily when you have inch-long acrylic nails.”
With the nails on permanently, Robbie began to develop an appreciation for those who wear acrylics in their day-to-day lives. “It was incredibly inconvenient for my personal life,” she told Grazia. “I don’t know how other women manage. The most mundane tasks were suddenly monumental tasks — unbuttoning buttons, texting, tying shoe laces, getting lids off things.
Eventually, though, the character in The Wolf of Wall Street served as the moment that Robbie got out of her comfort zone, and she began saying ‘yes’ to the things that she’d originally preferred not to do. “Anytime I thought ‘oh my God, that looks horrible,’ I’d say ‘do it’,” the actor noted. “I don’t like wearing lipstick or heaps of eye shadow, and they were staples for the character.”
