Did a Studio Lengthen Margot Robbie’s Legs for The Wolf of Wall Street?

Hollywood sorcery can be wonderful. CGI can make the Hulk not look like Lou Ferrigno, or it can ensure that your favorite actor doesn’t have to risk disfigurement to wrestle with a mountain lion. It can also extend the legs of fairly tall actress just a teeny-tiny bit so that when she uses them to fend off Leonardo DiCaprio, it looks like Leonardo DiCaprio would have to hire a ski instructor named Rolf and a Swiss mountain dog just to set up base camp on the actress’s knee. This is what the American cinephile demands — subtle body distortions that make us all look askance at our movie dates and wonder, “Why are my date’s legs so freakishly short? What’s wrong with them??”

If you saw The Wolf of Wall Street — or, really, sat through the previews of any of the Oscar-giddy dramas — you saw Australian actress Margot Robbie sitting lustily in what appears to be a nursery, keeping Leonardo DiCaprio at bay with a long, extended leg. It’s all very sexy, or it might be sexy if you could stop imagining Martin Scorsese barking, “Cut!” and giving Robbie new instructions about how to adjust her leg so that viewers could get the most tantalizing suggestion of meniscus. However, according to the New York Post (by way of a rumor in the Sunday Times of London), Scorsese might have just given up on trying to get the perfect leg shot and employed some cutting-room photoshop to slightly lengthen Robbie’s leg.

These sorts of post-production digital surgeries apparently happen all the time, which, at this point in our photoshop awareness, shouldn’t surprise us. Still, it’s a little strange that a visual effects studio like Lola Digital Effects (which was hired to “clean up” actors’ images in Wolf) would go through the trouble of stretching Robbie’s leg just to raise the Hollywood standard for female beauty to an even more subtly unrealistic plateau. That would constitute some next-level gaslighting of the American moviegoing public, like students agreeing to move everything in a classroom an inch to the left, just to drive their teacher to question the very nature of reality.

Reps for Wolf haven’t said whether Robbie’s leg was extended in the film, but in case you were holding out hope that some reasonable someone involved with the movie was like, “You guys, why are we spending $200,000 to have someone add CGI hamstrings to Margot Robbie? We could have birthday cake and champagne at the craft services table for that money!” the original plan was to accentuate Robbie’s already impossibly blue eyes. Probably with tiny kittens performing Swan Lake that viewers couldn’t even see so much as sense so that whenever Robbie stared at her costars, she was sending a subliminal message about cat ballets and the dangers of Wall Street excess.