GODS AMONG US: LEONARDO DICAPRIO
In our regular series, we pay tribute to the towering, megawatt stars who still roam Hollywood This month: The former heartthrob who seeks the dark side LEONARDO DICAPRIO
Join us for a deep dive into the eclectic and glittering career of Martin Scorsese’s favourite actor (Under-65s category).
JAMES CAMERON IS a hard man to rattle. He mopped up real blood in an operational morgue for Piranha II. He narrowly survived drowning while making The Abyss. He dived to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, just because. But the scenes the director witnessed on 1 November 1997 unsettled him like nothing else.
By the time he arrived at Shibuya’s Orchard Hall theatre in Japan, the crowd of teenage girls was six deep and heaving. Many had been there for three nights; one announced to reporters she’d secured her spot a week ago. They were there not so much for Cameron’s latest movie, Titanic, holding its world premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival, as for its star: 23-year-old former child actor Leonardo Dicaprio, cast in the role of doomed vagabond charmer Jack Dawson.
As Cameron and his then-wife Linda Hamilton rolled up to the red carpet, the chants of “ROMEO! ROMEO!” crescendoed. In order to avoid the crowd, Dicaprio had already sneaked in through a side entrance. Not that the crowd knew this. They assumed he was in Cameron’s car. So as soon as he and Hamilton cracked open their limo’s doors, the pent-up energy of 3,000 fans exploded.
A screaming mob overwhelmed the riot-gear-clad Tokyo police and stormed the carpet, but Cameron and Hamilton managed to fight their way to the lobby. The director was shocked and awed. “It was like being in a riot in Calcutta,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “The police couldn’t control it. Linda and I almost got killed. It was the most unbelievable scene I have ever been party to.”
What they’d experienced was just a single instance of one of the most intense and widespread fan-phenomena in recent history: Leo-mania.
Most stars have a complicated relationship with fame. But few have felt it with such supernova intensity as Dicaprio during the late ’90s, following the success of Baz Luhrmann’s frenetic Shakespeare remix Romeo + Juliet (in
which Dicaprio played the star-crossed Montague) and the billion-dollar phenomenon that was Titanic. The latter, the young actor announced at that same fateful premiere, “made a man out of me”. But in one sense it did the opposite, with Dicaprio’s undeniable physical appeal driving a popular misconception that there was little more to him than his boyish good looks. “Being hunk of the month annoys me,” he told the Los Angeles Times as early as 1993. “I’m looking for longevity.”
He felt just as uncomfortable with the sudden media attention that those looks created. “It was a surreal point in my life,” he’d tell Empire almost two decades after Leo-mania’s peak. “You are at this young age and you don’t know how to react to it. It has affected my personal life ever since. I don’t think you ever get used to the type of attention the media has on you.”
His immediate response was to pause, step back and think carefully about his next move, in the hope that things would settle down. Aside from a self-parodying cameo as a spoiled-brat film star in Woody Allen’s Celebrity, Dicaprio only made two films during the next four years (the twin mis-steps of The Man In The Iron Mask and The Beach). But, in the longer term, Leo-mania simply drove him to double down on a lifelong career strategy: to never coast on those kneeweakening good looks. To hide them in the shadowy folds of his characters. To be, as his manager Rick Yorn once so neatly described him, “a character actor in a leading man’s body.”
That strategy had already formed in Dicaprio’s mind when he joined around 300 other teenage actors to audition for the lead role in Michael Caton-jones’ This Boy’s Life, a ’50s-set coming-ofage story based on the memoirs of Tobias Wolff. Among them: Tobey Maguire, Lukas Haas and Joaquin Phoenix.
When Dicaprio’s turn came to read a scene with Robert De Niro — who starred as the young Wolff’s abusive stepfather — the 16-year-old Dicaprio got right up in the one-time Travis Bickle’s face and, veins pumping, screamed at him, full blast. After a moment of excruciating silence, De Niro burst into laughter. Dicaprio thought he’d screwed the pooch, but De Niro was impressed. This kid was willing to go to places the others weren’t.
By now, Dicaprio had made his first film appearance (in the best-forgotten Critters 3) and secured solid work on TV shows like Santa Barbara, Parenthood and Growing Pains. Even so, he told Esquire in 2013, “I always thought of myself as the underdog, because I didn’t have nice clothes or maybe my hair didn’t look good.” He was less interested in being the cute, scrubbed moppet than in being, well, the next De Niro.
With parents he described to The Hollywood Reporter as “kind of hippies”, Dicaprio grew up in California’s “underground culture”, encountering the likes of Charles Bukowski, Robert Crumb and Timothy Leary via his comic-book-writer father George. His stomping ground was the rougher side of Hollywood, the environs of Le Sex Shoppe and The Waterbed Hotel, where he’d often stumble upon people copulating in alleyways.
Small, slight and delicate, Dicaprio was regularly bullied, beaten up, dumped in trash cans. By his early teens he was begging his Germanborn mother, Irmelin — who by this point had divorced George — to take him to auditions.
Acting, he reasoned, was their best way out of there (though he’d have settled for being a travel agent or marine biologist).
There was an edge, a daring to his antics. “When I was nine, I saw the murderer Charles Manson on TV but I really had no idea who he was,” Dicaprio told The People in 1998. “I went to school the next day doing a Manson with a swastika painted on my head. Of course, I got sent home. Dad had to go in and explain to the principal that it was just an imitation.” Dark characters clearly appealed from a very early age. Much like those played by Robert De Niro.
Dicaprio first saw him in Martin Brest’s Midnight Run. His dad took him to see the film on its release in 1988 and told his 13-year-old son to take careful note of its f-bomb-dropping star. “See this guy?” George said. “Now this guy is cool.”
Young Leo did more than take note. He threw himself into De Niro’s oeuvre, along with every other classic film he could lay his eyes on. “I just watched every movie I could and said, ‘Someday I want to do something as great,’” he told Empire
in 2013. It worked. Four years later he was acting alongside De Niro, holding his own in every