It was the film that launched her into Hollywood stardom, but for Margot Robbie, the Wolf of Wall Street was a different kind of first.
Glancing at the Australian native's sultry new Vanity Fair cover would convince strangers that Robbie is comfortable in her skin, but even an endless supply of self confidence could not have prepared her for stripping naked to film a sex scene alongside the legendary Leonardo DiCaprio.
For seasoned Oscar winners like Reese Witherspoon and Natalie Portman, filming a sex scene can still be the most awkward task on the job after filling decades of roles. However, for the 26-year-old newcomer, Wolf marked her first full faux romp.
"I hadn't done a proper sex scene before. I'd done scenes where it's leading into sex or sex has just finished, but I hadn't done a start-to-finish sex scene like I did in Wolf," she told the magazine. "That was my first."
"Tons of people are watching you," the starlet admitted. Regardless of her inner apprehension, there was no turning back. "There isn't an option. It's just like, This is what you need to do—get on with it. The sooner you do it, the sooner you can stop doing it."
Despite the discomfort, her performance as the Brooklyn-bred "Duchess of Bay Ridge" Naomi Lapaglia made Hollywood turn its head. Just two years later, she's slated to star as three iconic figures—Tarzan's Jane, the Joker's Harley Quinn and America's Tonya Harding. As an avid fan of American culture, Robbie was already studying popular characters as a child.
"I remember watching American movies and TV shows growing up and thinking, Oh, God, these crazy characters doing these outlandish things, how do the writers come up with it?" she explained. "Then I moved to America and met so many people just like the people in the movies, and I realized, Oh, so this is just real life in America."
Though that study paid off and her resumé is beginning to read like that of a silver screen icon, Robbie hasn't fallen prey to the tabloid fodder that often traps young stars on the rise. Instead, she's been shaped in the limelight as a public figure "uncomfortable with fame," as Vanity Fair describes. However, when asked about the reputation preceding her, she insists that definition is not complete.
"It's [true] to an extent, but it's not the thesis of me as a person," she said. "When you put it as a thesis, it seems like it's the only question on my mind. But it's just one of the questions, one of the things I wonder. How would things be different if I'd made different choices?"
Regardless of Robbie's personal reflection, her career seems to be forging full steam ahead, prompting the magazine to label these next months as "the Summer of Margot Robbie." While she's clearly celebrated in the United States, Margot may have to keep an eye on her homeland as she rises in the ranks.
"There's a thing in Australia called tall-poppy syndrome. Have you heard of it? It's a pretty prevalent thing—they even teach it in school," she explained to the magazine. "Poppies are tall flowers, but they don't grow taller than the rest of the flowers, so there's a mentality in Australia where people are really happy for you to do well; you just can't do better than everyone else or they will cut you down to size."