When Margot Robbie’s love for ‘Titanic’ came full circle: “It was very surreal”

Posted On December 6, 2024December 6, 2024

Despite years of hard work and grafting behind the scenes, Margot Robbie seemed to explode into stardom quite suddenly after the release of The Wolf of Wall Street, playing the role of Naomi alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.

After years of starring on the Australian soap Neighbours and more minor roles in independent movies, audiences were flabbergasted by her magnetic screen presence in the 2013 epic directed by Martin Scorsese. Robbie has described the audition process for the film in many interviews, detailing the specific accent and high heels she had to wear to convince the casting directors that she could play the role of the trophy wife. But after being cast in the project, Robbie found her unique ways of embodying the character, something that felt all the more surreal given the actors around her. 

There are many dramatic scenes in The Wolf of Wall Street that require huge emotional outbursts and screaming matches between Naomi and Jordan, with the pair hurling glasses of water and nasty insults at each other as they argue over his drug use and incompetence as a father.

But in order to prepare for the more emotional scenes, Robbie would listen to the Titanic theme tune, saying, “I can even just hear the theme music of ‘Titanic,’ and I’ll be bawling. And so that’s what I do on set if I need to cry in a scene.”

Because Robbie was acting alongside DiCaprio, who famously starred in the 1997 film, this must’ve been a surreal and slightly jarring experience. However, this was made all the more strange when Robbie was preparing for a scene in which she needed to cry by listening to the score, when something happened that made the fictional story seem all the more real.

Robbie explained: “On ‘Wolf of Wall Street,’ there was the big, crazy scene after I ask for a divorce and stuff. And Kate Winslet came to visit set, to visit Leo [DiCaprio] that day. I was in the room next to them, listening to the ‘Titanic’ soundtrack trying to stay in sad, teary mode. And then I saw Kate Winslet and Leo walk past. It was very surreal.” 

It is perhaps a more dramatic form of method acting if you can bring to life the characters that you use to make you cry and something that would be imaginably jarring for someone who was an emerging star within Hollywood and still adjusting to the quirks of the industry. 

Perhaps the immersive quality of this technique helped Robbie achieve such a staggering performance, which sky-rocketed her career and led her to work with Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson and Damien Chazelle. In Babylon, Robbie’s character very much mirrors the journey of breaking into the industry as a newcomer, something that was surely a full-circle moment for the actor after embarking on this path herself many years ago. Robbie is currently set to star in the upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation alongside Jacob Elordi, which Emerald Fennel will direct.  

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