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Leonardo DiCaprio[1] is the titular wolf but Jonah Hill[2] has the teeth in Martin Scorsese[3] ’s ferocious three-hour epic about debauchery, larceny and financial audacity, The Wolf of Wall Street.
Hill was fitted with massive, snow-white veneers to play Donnie Azoff, business partner and equally morally bankrupt best friend of real-life 1990s stock market manipulating hotshot Jordan Belfort[4] (DiCaprio).
Hill’s character is a fictitious one, loosely based on Belfort’s business partner, Danny Porush[5] , who refused to participate in the film based on Belfort’s bestseller[6] . It chronicles Belfort’s rise astride a non-stop party lifestyle that generated so much cash, he couldn’t figure out what to do with it all.
“I do an accent and a different voice and when I first got the teeth I couldn’t talk without a horrible lisp,” Hill said over the phone from New York ahead of The Wolf of Wall Street’s Dec. 25 opening.
Hill’s dialogue coach on the film suggested he practise speaking with the new teeth a couple of hours a day but Hill recalled with a laugh, there was nobody willing to listen to him work out his vocal problems. Then he hit on a novel idea.
“I would call stores: Target, Best Buy, as Donnie,” he said, adding he would be “more polite” than his remarkably offensive onscreen character.
“The biggest challenge was the way Donnie treated people,” said Hill of tackling the role, which is creating some potential Oscar buzz. “He was awful.”
After long days playing Donnie over the six months of shooting, Hill found himself feeling “really guilty” on the way home as he considered all the horrible things the drug-addicted, despicable broker did to people
“All of my characters have a lot of flaws,” Hill said of the men he’s played onscreen. “But at the end of the day, they all had a good heart. This was the first time I played someone I didn’t feel had that.”
The role also called for Hill to do some demanding physical work, including a crazed fight scene with DiCaprio, with both characters stoned out of their minds on fistfuls of Quaaludes.
“It hurt!” he laughed. “Leo is a lot bigger than I am and that was crazy. I got punched in the face for real (in another scene) and that sequence with Leo and I fighting, it took a week to shoot that.”
Hill also ended up with bronchitis from snorting massive amounts of vitamin D, which stood in for the great piles of cocaine Belfort and Azoff plowed through daily.
But as physically challenging as it was to play Donnie, “the emotional stuff is more difficult,” Hill pointed out.
“Donnie had no impulse control, he has no morals.”
The role is Hill’s most challenging to date. “I’ve never been so proud of a performance,” he said, adding a good measure of credit goes to Scorsese.
“There’s no words for it,” Hill said. “He’s my hero and my favourite filmmaker and it was just the most amazing experience …. he’s the greatest director of all time.”
It also comes as Hill marks an important birthday, turning 30 on Dec. 20. The actor had jokingly tweeted[7] a couple of days before: “My last week in my 20s. Time to get a job.”
Hill is downplaying his accomplishments, which saw him come from Judd Apatow[8] ’s stable of comic hits including Knocked Up, Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall to a very funny co-lead in Get Him to the Greek and an Oscar nomination as number-crunching genius Peter Brand in Moneyball.
Hill admits turning 30 prompts a time to take a look at his life.
“It is important. It’s not the number that matters with birthdays, they just force you to take stock of where you’re at and what you should be doing,” he said.
While his success seems evident, Hill points out “there’s always work to be done,” pointing to his writing (he co-penned scripts for the well-received comedy 21 Jump Street and the just-wrapped 22 Jump Street) and producing ambitions.
“Of course I am proud really proud of the friendships and relationships and family members and I am proud to have accomplished a lot of things I wanted to accomplish,” he said. “But a healthy outlook is to always look for more.”
References
- ^ Leonardo DiCaprio (www.imdb.com)
- ^ Jonah Hill (www.imdb.com)
- ^ Martin Scorsese (www.imdb.com)
- ^ Jordan Belfort (www.cnbc.com)
- ^ Danny Porush (www.motherjones.com)
- ^ Belfort’s bestseller (www.amazon.com)
- ^ tweeted (twitter.com)
- ^ Judd Apatow (www.imdb.com)
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