Margot Robbie Movie Stealing

SINGAPORE - She had her breakout role as Leonardo DiCaprio’s gold-digging wife Naomi in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated film, The Wolf Of Wall Street. Now, Australian actress and current It girl, Margot Robbie, is va-va-vooming her way onto the screens once again, cosying it up with another A-lister, Will Smith, in the latest rom-com/heist movie, Focus. And yes, she is once again stealing the show. This time, she plays Jess Barrett, a small-time but street-smart, spirited pickpocket who teams up with veteran con artist Nicky (Smith) in order to learn the tricks of the trade.

The future also looks bright for the rising 24-year-old star: She will next be seen as Jane, alongside Alexander Skarsgard in Tarzan; and as the Joker’s partner Harley Quinn in the highly anticipated Suicide Squad. Here, she shares what it’s like working with the hilarious Will Smith and perfecting the art of pick-pocketing.

A: How it happened was kind of hilarious, actually. I’d had a meeting with (writer/directors) Glenn Ficarra and John Requa months previously and nothing else had come of it, so I didn’t think I was going to get the role. Then, all of a sudden, when I was on holiday, far removed from civilisation, I got the call asking: “How soon can you get to New York?” So, I was a bit panicked. I threw all my clothes in my suitcase, took a catamaran followed by a ferry, and then got on a bus to the local airport to get to France, and, finally, flew from France to New York. And when I got there, I found out my luggage had been lost. I literally had just the clothes I was wearing, and had only slept about six hours in a couple of days - but I was going to that audition!

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I bought a shirt on the way, walked in and said, “Okay, guys, I’m here.” And I put the disclaimer out there: “It’s a long story, but just know that I can look a lot better.” Anyway, we did the audition and the next day they called up and said, “You’ve got it.” So, getting the role was an adventure in itself. It was amazing.

A: It was amazing. We got along so well and had so much fun. John and Glenn wrote the script, but they’re not precious with their material and were really open to letting us improvise with what they’d written. I love working that way. It keeps it fresh and sometimes you just get a golden moment, which you may not have gotten if you didn’t experiment.

It was a really fun environment. But there are so many comedic scenes in the film, and Will is so funny that sometimes it was hard to keep a straight face. Towards the end of the film, the characters have to face some harsh realities, but interspersed are these hilarious moments that are genuinely funny. There are these dramatic tonal shifts that are incredibly challenging for an actor, but I loved those moments. It was a great experience.

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A: When I first read the script, I did a bit of research, and (sleight-of-hand artiste) Apollo Robbins was the first name I came across. I found out that he was actually on board as a consultant on this film. I got to do hours and hours of training with Apollo Robbins, which was a really cool experience and really fun. Apollo takes it beyond the physical mechanics and into the psychological — how you can work around what the brain can pick up on (in order) to steal from people without detection. It’s incredibly fascinating stuff when you get into the dynamics of it all - and is kind of a fun party trick to have up your sleeve. (Laughs)

A: Before we got to Argentina, most of my scenes were with Will and the actors who play his crew. Rodrigo’s character, Garriga, is a rich and powerful race car owner who comes in later in the film. And what is funny is that Garriga seems very cold, but Rodrigo is lovely. He’s just so sweet and, of course, I’m sure I’m the envy of women everywhere for getting to work with him! (Laughs)

A: That was very fun but also eye-opening. We were actually filming pickpocket scenes in places where we’d see signs saying, “beware of pickpockets”. I had already done all my pickpocket training, so the first time I went to Bourbon Street, I’d be going up to people and saying, “Excuse me, sir, you need to put your wallet in a different pocket.” I couldn’t even help myself! (Laughs) Once you’ve seen with your own eyes how it’s done, you can’t believe how easy we make it for people to steal from us, so in that way, this experience was great for me too.

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We know it's a hassle to switch browsers but we want your experience with TODAY to be fast, secure and the best it can possibly be.Focus, in theaters on Friday, stars Will Smith and Margot Robbie as con artists who fall in love. But the film has another star, one who never appears onscreen. His name is Apollo Robbins, and he’s credited as “con artist adviser/pickpocket design.” In other words, he staged all of the crimes that take place in Focus. So who is this man who taught Will Smith the art of the steal?

Robbins, who calls himself “the gentleman thief, ” is a magician and expert pickpocket. For years, he performed his skills in Las Vegas casinos, stealing watches and wallets right under guests’ noses. It wasn’t really stealing, of course, because he returned the items, albeit in jaw-dropping ways. For one of his tricks, described in a 2013 New Yorker profile, Robbins made man’s driver’s license disappear from his wallet and show up in a sealed bag of M&Ms in his wife’s purse. (The profile also recounts a famous story in which Robbins picked the pockets of former president Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service team in 2001.)

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It’s hard to conceive of a thief so talented that he can tell a person “I’m going to steal your watch, ” then steal it a minute later without them noticing. But that’s exactly what he does to New Yorker writer Adam Green in the video below, which was made to accompany Green’s article and has been viewed over a million times.

Over the past several years, Robbins’ fame has grown, thanks to his popular TED talk on “the art of misdirection” and his appearances on the NatGeo reality series Brain Games (on which he’s a producer). Somewhere along the line, actor Ryan Gosling became a fan. Robbins believes it was Gosling, who was attached to Focus prior to Will Smith, who suggested that the magician work on the film. “From what I understand, [Gosling] mentioned the idea of, besides just a thief, what if he was a little bit more cerebral and was kind of like a psychological thief that was interested in neuroscience and these other things.” Robbins told the Las Vegas Review Journal.

Gosling dropped out of the film, but Robbins stayed aboard, and was soon teaching Will Smith how to think like a criminal. “Will defaults to being a super nice guy, that’s who he really is. And he really feels compelled to make people happy, ” Robbins told the Review Journal. “And I needed him to understand and be able to feel comfortable with making people squirm and feel uncomfortable.” Smith says that Robbins even urged him to shoplift for real, which he declined to do. (Hear him talk about it in the interview clip below, via EURnews.)

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While Smith focused on the psychology of pickpockets, his costar Margot Robbie wanted to learn all the tricks. Thanks to Robbins’ lessons and extensive practice, the Australian actress was able to pick pockets like a pro for a scene set on a crowded New Orleans street. “It’s incredible that she pulled that off, ” said Robbins. “The stuff that’s in there is really hard, I can attest to that.” (Read more in the full Las Vegas Review Journal interview here.)

Overall, Robbins worked on around 40 “bits” in the film, along with his wife, fellow magician and deception artist Ava Do. Getting the couple involved in Focus seems to have been a smart decision: A review in The Hollywood Reporter praised the film’s “almost continuous display of Mr. Robbins’s tricks of the trade… the virtual raison d’etre of this how-to manual of criminal deception.”Focus is a 2015 American crime comedy-drama film writt and directed by Gln Ficarra and John Requa, starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie. The plot follows a career con artist who takes an aspiring femme fatale under his wing.

The film was released on February 27, 2015. It received mixed reviews from critics but was a success at the box office, grossing $158 million against its $50 million budget.

Focus (2015 Film)

Seasoned con-man Nicky Spurgeon