Margot Robbie hadn’t made a big name for herself in Hollywood before her role in The Wolf Of Wall Street. And when you’re auditioning for Martin Scorsese and alongside Leonardo DiCaprio for what will hopefully be your first big break, something extraordinary is warranted.

But Robbie went completely off the rails and did something so outrageous — the whole universe would have had to be working in her favor for that to turn out the way it did.

The famous slap she landed on DiCaprio’s cheek during their audition was a split-second decision and a good one, too.

All Or Nothing

“I got caught up in the moment,” Margot Robbie once joked when talking about the incident, following that up with, “it was stupid.” And while it might have been stupid, it amazingly did not backfire.

So, what actually happened?

While auditioning for her first big role, Robbie was hell-bent on making an impression. She and DiCaprio were acting out a scene. It was an intense scene where both their characters were in a heated argument.

All this was going on outside, but inside, Robbie was thinking about how she had to grab that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “You have literally 30 seconds left in this room and if you don't do something impressive nothing will ever come of it,” she was saying to herself.

The scene keeps going, and they’re both screaming at each other. She said she could barely keep up with his intensity.

DiCaprio ends his lines, still in character, saying, “You should be happy to have a husband like me. Now get over here and kiss me.”

Robbie did think about kissing him. But that thought got overridden by another part of her brain, which told her to do the apparently stupid thing — slap him.

So she walks up to him and lands, as Scorsese put it, a “thunderclap of a slap” on DiCaprio’s face and even followed that up with a '[expletive] you,’ none of which were in the script.

Gamble Pays Off

The room went “dead silent” after the slap. She froze. But the slap did its job — made a good impression.

That was Robbie and Scorsese’s first meeting, and she clinched the role of Naomi right then and there. “An improvisation that stunned us all,” said Scorsese on the note he penned for her in 2017.

DiCaprio was stunned, too. Robbie feared he would sue her, but he asked her to slap him all over again.

Going through Scorsese’s note, we get to know how impressed he was with her. When a guy like him can come up with nothing more than “Like no one else” while describing someone, that speaks volumes.

The note ends with a line probably no one will disagree with — “Margot is stunning in all she is and all she does, and she will astonish us forever.”