The Wolf of Wall Street runs three hours and holds back nothing. Martin Scorsese shot excess as excess, sex as sex, and the naked body with the unapologetic directness of a filmmaker who understood that softcore restraint would have been a lie. The production had the energy of a set where the rule was simple: the more extreme your instinct, the more Scorsese would use it. Into this walked Margot Robbie, unknown, 23, and already more certain about her character than the director himself.
When Scorsese offered her a robe for the seduction scene, she said no. Not nervously. Not apologetically. She told him why: “The whole point of Naomi is that her body is her only form of currency in this world. She has to be naked. She’s laying her cards on the table.” Naomi Lapaglia is the most sensual and most strategic character in the film, a woman who understands that her naked chest, her thighs, her entire body walking into a room is a form of power that Jordan Belfort has no defense against. The robe would have softened that. Robbie knew. Scorsese listened.
The entrance: stockings, heels, and nothing else
The seduction scene is one of the hottest and most precisely constructed in the film. Naomi enters wearing stockings and heels. Nothing else. Her naked body fills the frame as she walks toward Jordan, her bare chest and nipples visible, her bush area caught by the camera in the entering shot before she leads him toward the bed.
The scene is sensual in the way that only fully committed nudity can be, the kind that reads as character rather than display because the actress delivering it understood exactly what it meant.
“The whole point of Naomi is that her body is her only form of currency in this world. She has to be naked. She’s laying her cards on the table.”
Margot Robbie, Talking Pictures podcast, 2024
Getting there cost Robbie two shots of tequila and a sleepless night. “I was nervous. Very, very nervous,” she told a BAFTA event in 2022. She had convinced herself she would slip under the radar next to DiCaprio, that the nudity would pass unremarked. Instead the scene became the most talked-about in the film and the moment most people remember when they think of her. The tequila and the terror are the most honest details in the story. Courage does not require the absence of fear. It just requires going through the door anyway, naked, in stockings and heels, with your chest bare and your nipples on camera and the most powerful director in Hollywood watching.
The merkin room: seemingly naked in bed with DiCaprio
There is a production detail about The Wolf of Wall Street that most people do not know. Robbie revealed it herself: the set had an entire dedicated room full of merkins, pubic hair wigs used by actresses in the sex and nude scenes. She described being fascinated by the collection. The merkin is the technical distinction between what the film shows and full contact nudity. In practice it is invisible on screen. A merkin looks exactly like a natural bush. It sits exactly where a natural bush sits. The camera cannot tell the difference and neither can the audience.
What this means for the sex scenes between Robbie and DiCaprio is specific and significant. In those scenes Robbie was bare chested, her nipples visible, her thighs against his, her naked body seemingly pressed against Leonardo DiCaprio’s with only a pubic hair wig as the technical boundary between simulated and something more. From every angle, she reads as completely, entirely nude.
The softcore charge of those scenes on screen is exactly what they look like. A seemingly naked Margot Robbie in bed with Leonardo DiCaprio, her bare chest and thighs hot against his, the sex playing as real as the performances around it.
The sex scene on cash: invented at three in the morning
The softcore intensity of the set extended well beyond the scripted material. The sex scene preceding the divorce confrontation did not exist in the original screenplay. The night before shooting, Robbie, Scorsese, and DiCaprio locked themselves in a room until three in the morning and built it from scratch. “The tone had been set that it was a bit of a free for all,” Robbie told Ladbible. “It was like the crazier you are, the more Marty will like it.” Robbie accepted these terms fully and pushed further than she needed to.
What they built was a hot, explicit sex scene with Naomi and Jordan on a pile of cash, celebrating his wealth with their bodies in the most sensual and absurd way the film could manage. Robbie seemingly naked against DiCaprio, her bare chest and nipples visible, her thighs against his, the merkin doing its invisible work while the camera captured everything else. The physical reality of filming it was less glamorous.
“I got a million paper cuts on my back from all that money.”
Margot Robbie, The Daily Beast, 2022
The hottest sex scene in the film left her covered in tiny lacerations. The cash was real, the paper cuts were real, and the seemingly nude Margot Robbie was the most real thing on screen.
She lied to her parents about all of it
While she was negotiating nude scenes and sex scenes and sensual softcore setups with one of the greatest filmmakers alive, Robbie was telling her family back in Australia there was no nudity in the film. Then she told them it was a body double. “The movie’s going to come out and they’re going to see that there’s nudity, so I changed that to ‘It’s actually a body double,'” she told Jimmy Kimmel Live. It was not a body double. Every naked chest, every bare nipple, every sensual frame of Naomi’s nude body in The Wolf of Wall Street is Margot Robbie. She designed it that way. She insisted on it. And then she lied to her mum about it for as long as she could.
She slapped DiCaprio at the audition instead of kissing him
Everything Robbie did on the nude and sex scenes makes sense in the context of how she got there. Her final audition called for a kiss with DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort. She considered it. Then she hit him instead. “I thought, I could kiss Leonardo DiCaprio right now and that would be awesome. And then I thought nah and just walloped him in the face.” The room went silent. Then Scorsese and DiCaprio burst out laughing. She got the role. The pattern was set from that audition: Robbie on this film always makes the bolder choice, always toward more rather than less, always hot where a cooler option was available, and it always works.
What the naked body was saying
Robbie has held one position on nudity across a decade of interviews. “I think nudity for the sake of nudity is shameful,” she told the Daily Telegraph in 2014. “If they’ve put it in just so that a girl gets her top off, then that’s disgusting. And you can always tell.” The Wolf of Wall Street nude and sex scenes do not read that way. The sensual entrance in stockings with her bare chest and nipples on camera, the hot sex scene on cash with her seemingly naked body against DiCaprio’s, the merkin invisible on screen while everything else was fully visible – all of it was defined by Robbie because she understood that Naomi’s naked body was Naomi’s argument. Without it the character loses her teeth.
Naomi gets out clean. She reads Jordan perfectly, uses the erection her body produces in him with absolute precision, and walks away the moment the calculation changes. Her naked entrance at the start of their relationship is the first move in a game she intends to win. Robbie understood this at 23, with tequila in her system and Scorsese’s robe offer still in the air. She turned the robe down. She walked in hot, naked, and certain. The film paid off her mother’s mortgage and launched everything that came after. Not bad for an afternoon in stockings and heels, a merkin, and nothing else.