The Wolf Of Wall Street Scene You Didn't Realize Was Improvised
Leonardo DiCaprio has delivered some stunning performances on the big screen over the years, and there's a long-held belief among many of his fans that he'd deserved to win an Oscar for his work on a number of different films. Of course, the star eventually nabbed the Best Actor Academy Award (via IMDb) for his dedicated performance as frontiersman Hugh Glass in Alejandro González Iñárritu's "The Revenant." However, many casual viewers and critics alike still think he should've won an Oscar for his work in "The Wolf of Wall Street."
When the Martin Scorsese-directed movie arrived back in 2013, it was met with plenty of rave reviews, and it currently holds both a 79% Tomatometer score and an 83% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Many critics praised, in particular, DiCaprio's charismatic portrayal of the film's central, infamous stockbroker.
In addition to DiCaprio, the 2013 film is crammed with talented actors, including Margot Robbie, Cristin Millioti, Kyle Chandler, Jonah Hill, Jon Bernthal, and Matthew McConaughey, and many conversations about the movie have focused on the performances given by its various stars. What some fans of "The Wolf of Wall Street" might not realize though, is that one of the most famous scenes in the film was actually improvised.
Matthew McConaughey's chest-thumping chant wasn't scripted
When speaking about his life and career on Twitter, Matthew McConaughey revealed that the lunch scene he has with Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Wold of Wall Street" was partly improvised. Indeed, it turns out that the moment when McConaughey's Mark Hanna starts hitting his own chest and chanting was inspired by something the actor typically does before filming his scenes.
"The actual [chant], that is something that I'll do not only in this film, I'll do it before scenes in a lot of films," McConaughey revealed. "I'll come up with a different tune and it's a relaxation tool for me. It's musical, so it gets me out of my head because I don't want to be thinking as an actor, I want to be doing." He added that the exercise "keeps my voice low and keeps my instrument loose."
McConaughey also revealed that, after filming their "Wolf of Wall Street" scene several times, it was Leonardo DiCaprio who came up with the idea of bringing McConaughey's chant into the film. McConaughey explained that the two actors had already done "five takes" of the scene by the time the chant entered the conversation, saying, "As we're packing up to move onto another setup for another scene, Leonardo goes, 'What's that thing you're doing before the scene? What if you put that in the scene?'"
Obviously, this story says a lot about DiCaprio and how he's always thinking about getting the best performances out of his scene partners as well as himself.