She's fast becoming hot property in Hollywood, but that hasn't stopped Australian actress Margot Robbie from charming viewers of late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! with her tales of binge-eating, spewing and lying to her parents.

While hardly the sort of stuff broadcaster ABC's parent company Disney would endorse, the 11.35pm start time for Kimmel's show – which draws up to 3 million viewers a night – means Robbie would have been talking straight to the target audience for the film she has a major role in, Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street.

The role continues her meteoric rise; according to imdb.com's starmeter – which tracks the interest in showbiz identities according to frequency of searches by the site's millions of users – Robbie today sits in the number two position, with only Jennifer Lawrence above her.

Robbie plays Naomi Lapaglia, girlfriend of Leonardo DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort, in Scorsese's movie, a role that is a million miles away from her early days on Neighbours.

“You are very naked in the movie, for a lot of the film,” Kimmel said on the segment that aired on Tuesday night in the US. “Did they tell you about that going in or was that a surprise?”

“Yeah, that was a small point of contention with my family,” said Robbie. “I just flat out lied to my family for a really long time. I said, 'I don't care what you hear, there is no nudity, I'm not doing any nudity. Ignore anything anyone's saying, there is no nudity'.

“And then I thought, 'Well, the movie's going to come out and they'll see there's nudity', so I changed that. The lie evolved to, 'Well actually it's a body double, and they just CGI-ed my head onto someone else'.

“My family don't have anything to do with the entertainment industry so they totally bought it. They were like, 'They can do that?' And I was like, 'Oh, technology these days, you wouldn't believe what they do in Hollywood'.”

Eventually, Robbie said, she came clean to her family and urged them to read Belfort's memoir, on which the film is based, before seeing the film. Still, she planned to steer clear of her old haunts – including the small Queensland country town of Dalby, where she was born and her grandparents still live – until after the dust has settled.

“I'm hoping I'm going to be home when it comes out and then I'm just going to fly the coop so I can miss the aftermath,” the 23-year-old said.

“The good news,” added Kimmel, “is that everything after this is gravy, everything after this is a Disney film by comparison. You will have no problems from here on out.”

Indeed, that increasingly looks like the story of Robbie's Hollywood adventure. After a 311-episode apprenticeship on Neighbours playing Donna Freedman (her first appearance was in June 2008, her last in January 2011), Gold Coast-raised Robbie looks well-positioned for a crack at the big time.

Although she confessed to Kimmel that she thought she blew a signing with her US agency 360 because she told the agent about a time that she ate 1.8 kilograms of spaghetti on the set of Neighbours.

"And then I just spewed up four pounds of spaghetti bolognese, like projectile. Have you ever seen that movie where she is possessed? It was like that and then he signed me and here we are doing Wolf of Wall Street."

Her Scorsese coup – for which she mastered a Brooklyn accent, she told Kimmel, by imagining she was wearing acrylic nails – comes hot on the heels of a role in Richard Curtis's English time-travel rom-com About Time, and on the back of a lead role in the Mad Men-esque TV series Pan Am, about the early glamorous days of international jet travel.

Next up she will star opposite Will Smith in the crime comedy Focus – but right now all eyes are on her.