The scene Margot Robbie “dreaded” filming
The last decade has seen Margot Robbie rise from being an Australian soap star to a Hollywood icon. Beginning her career as a regular on Neighbours, the actor landed her first significant film role in Richard Curtis’ 2013 romantic comedy, About Time.
That same year, Robbie scored the leading female role of Naomi Lapaglia in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Playing the wife of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort, Robbie impressed audiences with her Brooklyn accent and cold charm. After improvising a slap on DiCaprio in the audition, the actor secured the job, subsequently launching her career as one of the industry’s most coveted stars.
Since The Wolf of Wall Street, Robbie has appeared in many high-profile productions, from I, Tonya, to Suicide Squad, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Babylon. She has even taken on the task of bringing Barbie to life for Greta Gerwig’s 2023 eponymous spectacle. Due to her incredible performance alongside the seasoned DiCaprio, it’s easy to forget that The Wolf of Wall Street was one of Robbie’s first film credits at just 22 years old. Therefore, she was understandably nervous about shooting certain scenes, specifically the nursery sequence.
In an interview with IndieWire, Robbie opened up about the iconic scene involving her character seducing and teasing her husband in their child’s nursery, “she’s touching herself, effectively masturbating.” Unbeknownst to Naomi, Jordan leaves a hidden camera in a teddy bear’s eyes, capturing everything. The actor revealed that she was “secretly dreading that scene,” explaining how “That was going to be more uncomfortable to watch than the sex scene at the end. It was going to be really awkward.”
Talking to Porter Magazine, she explained that filming such intimate scenes in front of the crew was embarrassing. “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. 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.”
Discussing the uncomfortable sex scene that occurs before Jordan punches Naomi’s stomach, Robbie said: “We just wanted it to be just the most tragic sex scene you’ve ever seen. Just uncomfortable, and tragic. Uncomfortable, because we wanted him to be so unaware of her repulsion towards him. Because so much of the nursery scene got cut out, something that you kind of miss is that [Jordan and Naomi] had a sick sort of aspect to their relationship. Not them as the real people, but the characters we created. He’s got this sexual obsession with her, and she uses her sexuality to manipulate him, so they both play these weird sort of fucked up sex games to just mess with each other.”
