“I’m Gonna Eat Your Goldfish”: A Production-Used Donnie Azoff Goldfish Prop From The Wolf of Wall Street
Few moments in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street capture the film’s sense of unchecked excess quite like the goldfish scene. Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff, furious at an underperforming broker, fires the kid and then eats his goldfish right in front of him, a moment of pure Stratton Oakmont cruelty played for shock and laughs. The scene has a real-life basis: Danny Porush, the Stratton Oakmont co-founder the Azoff character is loosely based on, has confirmed the story, recalling that he told one of his brokers he’d eat his goldfish if the broker didn’t do more business. Hill’s performance earned him an Academy Award nomination, and the goldfish moment became one of the most talked about, and most quoted, scenes in a film that earned a place among Scorsese’s most celebrated work of the 2010s.
Getting that scene on camera was its own challenge. Hill was allowed to place a real goldfish in his mouth for only three seconds at a time until the scene was perfected, and he has said he actually wanted to swallow the fish for real but couldn’t. That’s where props like this one come in. This is a production-used rubber goldfish stand-in, the kind of practical stand-in that kept the scene working without putting a real animal at risk, and it’s professionally mounted in a one-of-a-kind 12x12 shadowbox display, ready to hang. It comes with a COA from Anchored Props, giving collectors a documented piece of one of modern cinema’s most outrageous moments.
