The exact moment Leonardo DiCaprio became Margot Robbie’s favourite actor: “It was sweaty and smelt like dog food”
There can’t be many Hollywood A-listers who used to live in a shared five-bed house in Clapham and go to Inferno’s nightclub doing £1 shots of an evening; in fact, it’s fair to wager there is exactly one of them, and her name is Margot Robbie.
Simply by virtue of that period of her life which she says herself was one of her favourite times, and the fact that brilliantly she once got thrown out of the sticky-floored nightclub, it’s hard to begrudge her the bewildering success she’s had in the 13 years or so since she made global audiences go “Oh…wow” in unison in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, after which she’s gone on to become possibly the world’s leading female actor.
In between that movie and this year’s bodice-ripper Wuthering Heights, Robbie has made several decisions and put in several performances that have solidified that ascension, most spectacularly with the day-glo musical assault on the senses that was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie in 2023, the zeitgeist-capturing film that went toe-to-toe with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and brought in a staggering £1.4bn at the box office.
That film showed that she could quite easily lead a world-conquering movie without losing any of her down-to-earth persona, still coming across like the woman who could easily down pints in the Falcon at Clapham Junction in the afternoon and then dazzle the press at a premiere in the evening. But more importantly, under the Hollywood pressures of superficiality, she has pushed hard for female writers and directors, doing her best to change decades-old norms in the industry that are shown all too well in her 2019 movie Bombshell, which earned her an Oscar nomination.
In fact, as far back as 2014, she co-founded LuckyChap Entertainment, a production company that aims to produce female-focused film and TV and has proved a resounding success, making movies like Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn and Promising Young Woman and Robbie’s own ice skating biopic I, Tonya, which landed her another Academy Award nod.
The founding of that company came just a year after The Wolf of Wall Street, the multi-Oscar-winning movie that put her on the map and which saw her in an on-screen partnership with Leonardo DiCaprio that began with her slapping him in the audition for the movie and went on to include another outing in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood six years later.
Some of her scenes in the three hours of insanity that is The Wolf of Wall Street were pretty full on; most people will know about the one in which she enters a room wearing nothing but stockings and a look of intent, but the movie also included scenes with DiCaprio that proved more of a challenge for various reasons, some of which were canine-related.
She told British Vogue: “We were crammed into this tiny room, Leo and I in bed, 12 crew members crammed around us, all crouching in weird positions trying not to get in the frame. My character’s dog was meant to bite Leo’s feet, which were sticking out the end of the bed, but the dog wasn’t playing ball so two dog trainers had to squash in beside us, also on the bed, and coax the dog with bits of meat between Leo’s toes.”
Despite being one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, DiCaprio took it all in his stride however, and when Robbie’s friends called her excitedly to find out what it was like filming with him, she could only relay: ““It was sweaty and smelt like dog food”.
But nevertheless, her filming experience on Scorsese’s blur of Lambos, cocaine, big deals and Matthew McConaughey beating his chest was one she looks back on fondly, and as for DiCaprio, she says: “He is my favourite actor of all time.”
