Acting Tips from Mrs. Wolf of Wall Street (Hint: Get a Flask)
“Marty is an interesting director,” said Rob Reiner, who plays Mr. DiCaprio’s father in the film, “because he’s very gutty in that — he makes the character be the plot. He doesn’t structure films in a traditional kind of way. He invests all the effort and detail into the development of the characters, and that becomes the plot.” In this film, Jordan Belfort is the story, Mr. Reiner explained, and Mr. Scorsese “knows that if he is going to make that the story, he’s got to let the actors be as inventive and original and fresh and real as they can be.”
That, of course, meant a lot of improvisation. “I stopped learning my lines,” said Margot Robbie, the Australian actress who plays Belfort’s second wife, Naomi. Instead of being faithful to the script, she waited to hear Mr. Scorsese’s reaction. “If he likes it, you hear this laughter somewhere behind the monitors,” she said at the film’s New York premiere this month. “And you’re like, O.K., he likes it, and you keep going on whatever tangent you’re going on.”
“Other than that,” she added, “I was totally in the dark, and you never know if what you’re doing is completely stupid and everyone thinks you’re an idiot.” She was eating a brownie at this point and had taken off her heels. The Bagger liked her immediately.
Ms. Robbie, who auditioned several times to win the part, worked with an acting coach to rid herself of her initial dislike of the character. As written, “she seems like a gold-digging slut, to be honest,” Ms. Robbie said. But her coach, Nancy Banks, helped her out of her judgment and into a proper outer-borough accent. “She goes, ‘Pretend like you just had your nails painted,’” Ms. Robbie recounted. “And all of a sudden like I’m talking like ” — she broke into some Brooklynese — “Oh, I’m doing the accent, all because of the nails.” For the shoot, she asked to have long acrylic nails.
“You end up doing everything different,” 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.”
She also met with the real-life inspiration for the character, a former model named Nadine Caridi, and other women who followed the same trajectory. “Had I not met them, I would’ve thought that the character I was doing in the film was so melodramatic and so unrealistic,” she said, “but then once I meet them it’s like, ‘Wow, I’m doing a dulled-down version of this.’”
Her character’s audacity is perhaps best exemplified by her rampant nudity. The production schedule didn’t allow Ms. Robbie to warm up to it. “My first racy scene was the standing in the doorway, totally naked,” she said. “So that was diving in head first. And I was petrified. I’d come to work that morning and I was shaking, so scared, like, ‘I can’t do this.’”
A crew member took pity on her and offered her “a little liquid confidence,” she said. “And I was like, ‘it’s 9 in the morning!’ And he’s like, ‘We’re in New York!’ So I was like, ‘O.K., hook a brother up!’” He brought her a flask of tequila. “And I did three shots of tequila and then took my clothes off and did the scene and I was fine,” she said. “It really helped stopped my hands shaking, and gave me a little boost of confidence.”
“So,” Ms. Robbie concluded, “Acting 101: three shots of tequila and you’ll be fine.”
“My publicist is going to kill me when she finds out that’s how I answered the question,” she added, smiling.
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