29 Facts About The Wolf of Wall Street You Didn’t Know About

Today, we’re gonna be taking a look at one of the wildest movies in existence, The Wolf of Wall Street. And after re-watching the film, it’s honestly a surprise it even got an R rating with how far they took many of the scenes, but thank god they went so crazy with it, ’cause the movie’s uncensored display of debauchery and greed is what makes it so unique. On that note, let’s get right into.

Here are 30 facts you didn’t know about The Wolf of Wall Street.

Fact #1: Jonah Hill’s Prosthetic Teeth

Jonah Hill’s prosthetic teeth he wore to portray Donnie Azoff may have looked pretty fresh, but in acreality, there was nothing fun about them at all. According to Hill, they shred up his gums and gave him a really bad lisp, making it difficult to speak. In order to get used to the prosthetics, he talked to different businesses on the phone for two hours, which helped get rid of that annoying lisp.

Fact #: 2 Bribery & Money-laundering Conspiracy

The Wolf of Wall Street focused on the many crimes of Jordan Belfort and Stratton Oakmont, but did you know that the financing of the movie itself was ridden with fraud? Without getting too deep into it, I’m referring to the Malaysian 1MDB scandal, a corruption, bribery, and money-laundering conspiracy in which billions of dollars were embezzled from a sovereign wealth fund. Part of that money was siphoned into Red Granite Pictures, the production company that funded the entire cost of The Wolf of Wall Street. To put it simply, the movie about fraud and money laundering was produced by a company guilty of committing the same exact crimes, although on a much larger scale.

Fact #: 3 Using Pauses to Entice

When Jordan Belfort is teaching his team how to close a sale, he explains the importance of using pauses to entice the customer to speak: …and you wait, you wait, and whoever speaks first loses. Then later on in the film, Jordan uses the same tactic when trying to bribe the FBI agents:

It’s just about setting up the right team and then overnight your life can change.

Fact #4: The Goldfish Scene

In The Wolf of Wall Street, Donnie Azoff gets up to a lot of crazy antics, and this scene with the goldfish has to be up there with his most absurd moments. Wanting to make the scene as real as possible, Jonah Hill requested that they use a live goldfish, so that’s what they did. Of course, PETA didn’t allow him to eat the goldfish for real, but he was permitted to put it into his mouth for up to three seconds at a time.

Fact #5: Future President in the Movie

One of the weirder occurrences in the filming of the movie happened when they were shooting outside Trump Tower on 5th Avenue. It’s been reported that the future president approached the producers and asked for a role in the film. But he actually wanted to be a part of the movie and not just a walk-on. The filmmakers couldn’t accommodate him as the run time was already nearing four hours, but it’s crazy to know that he could have been a part of the film.

Fact #6: Bo Dietl Played by Himself

In the film, the private investigator that Jordan Belfort hired, Bo Dietl, was played by the real man himself. And funny enough, Dietl actually served as Belfort’s head of security and personal PI back in the day.

Fact #7: Margot Robbie’s Seduction Scene

Originally, Martin Scorsese felt it was good enough for Margot Robbie to just wear a bathrobe during the seduction scene. However, Robbie pushed back on the idea and wanted to go full nude, a first in her career. Her thought was,

The whole point of Naomi is that her body is her only former currency in this world. She has to be naked. She’s laying her cards on the table.

But even though the idea was totally hers, it doesn’t mean it was easy to pull off. Margot Robbie explained she had to have three shots before filming the scene, and even initially told her friends and family they used CGI to superimpose her head on another body.

Fact #8: Unscripted Chest Thumping Scene

Matthew McConaughey wasn’t in much of the film, but his chest thumping and ‘tutsukis’ were a memorable introduction to life on Wall Street. Something he may not have known is that McConaughey’s chest thumping was not a part of the script at all and was instead a warm-up routine that he’d do before most takes. At one point, DiCaprio took notice of McConaughey’s strange ritual and thought it would be a good idea to include it in the scene, and Scorsese agreed.

Fact #9: The Real Beach House Party

The beach house party in The Wolf of Wall Street actually happened in real life, and here the footage of actual party happened in 1991.

Fact #10: Guinness World Record

The Wolf of Wall Street set a Guinness World Record for the most uses of the F-word in any movie, coming in at 569 times. However, it held the record for less than a year as the movie Swearnet starring the Trailer Park Boys beat it out the next year with 935 uses.

Fact #11: Quaaludes Scene

During the scene where Jordan and Donnie are taking Quaaludes in his home gym, there is something very off in the background. If you take a look at the bench press, there is a ton of weight on that bar. If I can see correctly, there’s three 45 plates, a 35, and a 25, adding up to a total of 435 pounds.

And looking at Donnie and Jordan, there is absolutely no way they’d be able to work out with such a crazy amount of weight. Although, if the movie is actually a retelling of the story through the eyes of Jordan Belfort, it makes sense that there’d be so much weight on that bar in order to make himself look as badass as possible.

Fact #12: Brad Pitt as Jordan Belfort

Back in 2007, immediately after the release of the book The Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio got his hands on the memoir and was instantly drawn to the character and the story. But he wasn’t the only person who saw the potential, as Brad Pitt was also interested, culminating in a bidding war between the two, ultimately ending with DiCaprio and Warner Bros. winning.

From there, Martin Scorsese was considered to direct the film, but eventually left to go to Shutter Island, leading Warner Bros. to offer the spot to Ridley Scott, although that didn’t work out either. Production of the film went into limbo for a while, but what finally got Scorsese to step back into the role of director was the company Red Granite Pictures offering to finance the entire movie with the kicker being that they would impose no content restrictions.

Fact #13: Jonah Hill Taking the Real Punch

Because of the fact that Martin Scorsese is such an iconic director, none of the actors wanted to let him down, so they tried to film every scene as authentic as possible. Obviously, they couldn’t go around snorting cocaine and taking Quaaludes, but other parts of the movie required things they really weren’t excited for. This was the case in the scene where Brad punches Donnie for mouthing off to him. At first, they filmed a couple takes where Jon Bernthal just pretended to hit Hill, but Scorsese was not impressed and asked Jonah if he wanted to get hit for real.

Finding himself unable to turn down Scorsese, Jonah Hill turned to DiCaprio to speak up for him, but as he recalled, his fellow co-star ended up hanging him out to dry. So the scene was filmed with him actually taking a real punch and leaving a bruise for good measure.

Fact #14: jonah Hill Got Bronchitis

So obviously, I can’t show any of the scenes involving the use of cocaine, but I’m sure you remember there was a good amount of it in The Wolf of Wall Street. Since they couldn’t use the actual drug in the movie, Vitamin D powder was used in place of it. And Jonah Hill actually snorted so much of it over the months of filming he got bronchitis for three weeks and had to be hospitalized.

Fact #15: Different Camera Lenses to Illustrate the Frame of Mind

As a way of better illustrating the frame of mind that Jordan Belfort was in, director of photography Rodrigo Prieto used different camera lenses depending on the situation. Spherical lenses were used in scenes involving Jordan in a clear mental state. And to capture Jordan in an inebriated or confused state of mind, they employed anamorphic lenses. Finally, to exemplify the distress and paranoia of being pursued by the FBI, they decided to go with longer focal lenses.

Fact #16: Jonah Hill Dreamt Working with Martin Scorsese

For Jonah Hill, working with Martin Scorsese was a dream come true, as he’d always been a hero of his. Speaking about how badly he wanted to work with Scorsese, Jonah Hill said,

I would sell my house and give him all my money to work for him.

Of course, he didn’t exactly hand over his house and all his money to get the role. However, Jonah Hill did take a massive pay cut and only received somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000. And that wasn’t all, Jonah Hill also insisted on auditioning for Martin Scorsese, even though it wasn’t expected of him. It was the first audition he’d done in over six years, and he wanted to do it to convince Scorsese beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was the right fit for Donnie Azoff.

Fact #17: The Prosthetics

The Wolf of Wall Street is full of memorable scenes, but possibly the nuttiest is when Donnie starts masturbating to Naomi in front of everybody at the party. There’s no way I can actually show the clip here, but I can assure you it was not the real thing and rather a prosthetic. Because of the craziness of the scene, Jonah Hill had to go around and tell all the background actors exactly what he was going to be doing so they wouldn’t burst out laughing at the sight of him pulling out his genitalia and masturbating.

Fact #18: Clip Shot from an iPhone

The Wolf of Wall Street was a film that contained many firsts for director Martin Scorsese, and one that you might not expect was the use of a clip shot from an iPhone. The scene in question is the fasten seatbelt sign and was filmed on a commercial flight by effects supervisor Robert Legato. The clip was originally intended to be an example, but when Scorsese viewed the footage, he said,

Great, let’s just use that.

Fact #19: That Woman Got Her Head Shaved for Real

You would think there’s no way that woman got her head shaved for real, but there was nothing fake about it. The girl in question was Natasha Newman Thomas, a costume designer and a good friend of Leonardo DiCaprio. And surprisingly, this was her first and only acting gig to date.

Fact #20: The Dot-com Bubble Reference

When the FBI agents are on board Jordan’s yacht, he says,

This Goldman, the Lehman Brothers, Merrill, collateralized debt obligations, this internet stock. I mean, it’s a travesty.

This is a reference to the dot-com bubble involving tech stocks in 2000 and the financial crash of 2008 which was caused in large part by the major banks’ use of CDOs.

Fact #21: Steven Speilberg’s Grant

The day the Steve Madden IPO was definitely one of the high points of the film, and the entire sequence might have looked a lot different had it not been for Steven Spielberg. That’s because the day the scenes were filmed, Spielberg randomly showed up to the set to say hello and ended up staying for the entire shoot, offering his advice on how they should film many of the shots.

Fact #22: Bed Full of Cash

According to Margot Robbie, the sex scene on the bed full of cash was very uncomfortable because the fake bills had sharp edges, resulting in multiple paper cuts. DiCaprio echoed her sentiment and said it was definitely painful, but he didn’t care too much because he was laying on top of Margot Robbie naked, so his focus was elsewhere.

Fact #23: Real Mark Hanna

Something that was not depicted in the film was that the real Mark Hanna bought a 25% stake in Stratton Oakmont at its inception and worked with Belfort for another two years after their stint at L.F. Rothschild.

Fact #24: The Improvisations

If there’s one big takeaway from all these facts, it’s that Martin Scorsese loves improvisation in his films. And Margot Robbie, knowing this ahead of time, actually employed some improv in her audition to improve her chances of getting cast as the Duchess of Bay Ridge. The scene involved her and DiCaprio in a heated argument where he said,

You should be happy to have a husband like me. Now get over here and kiss me.

She remembered how a part of her thought, Maybe I should kiss him. When else am I ever going to get a chance to kiss Leo DiCaprio ever? But another part of her brain went the complete opposite way and she went back and screamed “f*ck you”, which of course wasn’t in the script at all. But Scorsese loved her boldness and so did DiCaprio, who even asked her to slap him again.

Fact #25: DiCaprio seeking out Alcohol Enthusiasm

Unlike the character he portrays in The Wolf of Wall Street, Leonardo DiCaprio has never been much of a drug or alcohol enthusiast. So when he had to film the scene where Belford overdoses on Quaaludes, he had to seek out inspiration for how a person in that situation might act. He eventually stumbled upon the iconic “Drunkest Guy in the World” video on YouTube and watched it on repeat until he became the man himself. DiCaprio said it was his motivation that was really intriguing. He had one singular goal, one that was to get a beer out of the 7-Eleven, and it took him a half an hour.

Fact #26: Martic Scorsese’s Highest Grossing Film

The Wolf of Wall Street is Martin Scorsese’s highest grossing film of his career, coming in at $392 million.

Fact #27: Danny Porush Fact Depictions

Danny Porush, the real Donnie Azoff, had some things to say about the truth of certain events depicted in The Wolf of Wall Street. So let’s play a little game of fact or fiction:

Event Depicted in the Movie	Fact or Fiction (According to Danny Porush)	Detail
Did he actually marry his first cousin?	Fact	He did marry his first cousin Nancy, had three children, and later got divorced.
Did people actually call Jordan Belfort “The Wolf”? (Look at this, The Wolf of Wall Street they call me! Look.)	Fiction	Porush doesn’t remember anyone ever calling him “The Wolf” and it’s likely a name he made up to advertise his book.
Was there once a chimpanzee at a Stratton Oakmont office party?	Fiction	There was never any chimpanzee or any animal for that matter in the office.
Did Danny Porush once eat a goldfish?	Fact	Porush recall telling a broker, “If you don’t do more business, I’m going to eat your goldfish,” so I did.
Did they use little people as human darts at an office party?	Fiction	They did invite little people over to some office parties, but there was no abuse like that present.
Did they pay a girl 10 grand to shave her head?	Fact	This part from the movie was totally true and she came out of it 10 grand richer.
Did Jordan Belford say the sexcapades in the office got so crazy they had to send out a memo declaring the office a free zone from 8am to 7pm?	Fiction	The work environment at Stratton Oakmont was absolutely akin to a fraternity, but it never got to that level.

Fact #28: Belfort’s Depiction of Work Life

After the release of the film, the real Jordan Belfort weighed in on parts of the movie he felt weren’t totally accurate. One scene in particular he had some issues with was the end of his marriage to Naomi. Belfort admitted to hitting her but said it was rather during the height of his drug addiction and their breakup occurred somewhat amicably after he was sober.

Another objection Belfort had with the movie was his depiction of work life, which looked more like a big party. However, all of this was a gross exaggeration because Belford said they wouldn’t have been able to get away with their illegal practices for so long had they not done serious legitimate business. Name of the game: move the money from your client’s pocket into your pocket.

Fact #29: What become of the real Jordan Belfort

So you might be wondering what’s become of the real Jordan Belfort all these years later? If you don’t already know, thanks in large part to the success of The Wolf of Wall Street, Belfort has been able to start a string of businesses including a YouTube channel, sales training programs, private consulting, motivational speaking, and even has a two-day cryptocurrency retreat that costs one Bitcoin (although a couple of years ago he did say that he thought Bitcoin was a scam for the average person- just run).

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