The recent weekend box office win of Focus has seemingly reinvigorated the previously beleaguered cinematic star power of Will Smith, possibly redeeming himself from 2013’s Afterbirth… err, After Earth. However, it seems that his gorgeous Aussie ingénue co-star, Margot Robbie may have dealt the star another diss during the auditioning process in the form of a rhetorical ribbing at the former Fresh Prince that was far meaner than "yo homes, smell ya later."
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the 24-year-old starlet anecdotally recalls the insane stream of events leading up to the Focus audition, which may come across as being a bit braggadocious about the globe-trotting cosmopolitan privileges that come with being a sexy movie star. Robbie recounts that she was in the midst of a backpacking vacation with her brother on an island off Croatia. After spending a day of swimming and sunning, disconnected from cell phones, some opportunity-filled messages were waiting and a mad 24-hour scramble had begun. According to Robbie,
I’m soaking wet because I’d been swimming, I get back to the hostel at 6 a.m., no sleep, turn my phone on, and I’ve got all these messages: ‘They want you to audition for Focus. Your flight leaves tonight.’ There’s only one catamaran to the mainland and it leaves in 20 minutes, so I’m grabbing my stuff and I race off and I get the catamaran, I get a bus to the airport, I get to the airport and wait six hours, I fly to France and wait another six hours, I fly to New York, and by the time I get to New York they’ve lost my luggage. My shoes are wet, my denim shorts are damp, I’ve got no makeup, no clothes, and I’d calculated that in the last 50-something hours I had six hours sleep in total, and I walk into the audition and it turns out Will was running late.He comes in and says, ‘Sorry I’m late, I was coming from Queens.’ And I look at Will and I was like, ‘Yeah? Well, I just came from an island off Croatia and I’m here on time.
While it’s doubtful that the interjection, "oh snap!" was uttered in any of the lines during the audition reading, it certainly appears that it would have been warranted, given that piece of punking. However, even for a married 46 year-old man with kids like Will Smith, such a ribbing coming from a young buxom beauty would not likely send him into a frenzy, inciting him to punch the nearest dreadlocked alien, telling it "welcome to Earth." In fact, the moment may have serendipitously set the tone in the bizarre, deceptive adversarial/romantic/mentor dynamic that the two stars would need to carry for the con genre film.
For Robbie, it may be a pattern, as this incident wasn’t even her first unorthodox auditioning moment. Of course, it was widely reported that she abruptly slapped Leonardo DiCaprio in the face during the audition process for her role as Jordan Belfort’s second wife in The Wolf of Wall Street. The bit of violence (that any man would gladly absorb from her) apparently worked in her favor in that instance, as well.
Robbie will be bringing plenty of that abruptness and spunk to an upcoming slew of higher profile roles as Jane in next year’s Tarzan remake and later on as the first big screen version of the face-painted homicidal paramour enabler of Jared Leto’s Joker, Harley Quinn in the super-villain team-up, Suicide Squad.
In the meantime, you can catch the jest-jabbing Margot Robbie go toe-to-toe with Will Smith in Focus at theaters now.
