Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio’s parents hung a painting above his crib in the grotty 1970s East Hollywood neighbourhood of Los Angeles when he was a baby. The painting wasn’t an action shot of Peter Rabbit or Curious George, the cartoon monkey. No, it was a reproduction of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s three-panelled The Garden of Earthly Delights, a dystopian visual description of Eden being found and lost. It is one of DiCaprio’s earliest memories.
“You literally see Adam and Eve being given paradise,” says DiCaprio, 41, his blue eyes peering above sunglasses in a Miami Beach restaurant. Underneath the table he fidgets his feet in and out of canvas loafers. He drifts away for a moment. DiCaprio just finished shooting an interview for a climate-change film he’s making (original working title: Are We F*****?). He’s already been to India’s floodplains and the Antarctic, and now he’s not far from Miami playgrounds where he once reputedly left a nightclub with every woman from his VIP section. All, according to DiCaprio, could be washed away.
He snaps back to the painting. “Then you see in the middle this overpopulation and excess, people enjoying the fruits of what this environment’s given us,” he says. He laughs a sad laugh, punctuated by the DiCaprio smile that can be mistaken for a sneer. “Then the last panel is just charred, black skies with a burnt-down apocalypse.” He stops for a second before shrugging. “That was my favourite painting.” Halfway between mother and maker, Leonardo DiCaprio is not unhappily marooned between the bright lights of his own life — a looming Oscar, a fossil collection, a chauffeured rental Tesla — and the bleakness of the overheated world he inhabits. He wants us to move away from fossil fuels entirely, and wonders where we would be if we had spent billions on renewable energy sources, rather than on fighting the Iraq war. “He has an intellectual restlessness,” says his longtime collaborator Martin Scorsese. “He devours books and texts and information.” Advertisement DiCaprio’s life-is-brutish-and-short worldview has permeated his post-Titanic film choices, especially his work with Scorsese, from Gangs of New York to The Wolf of Wall Street. Tonight he will find out if he has won the Oscar for best actor, for The Revenant, the bleak tale of the trapper Hugh Glass, whose body is demolished by a very angry grizzly, and who loses his family to the viciousness of the White Man. After that experience, maybe a Catch Me If You Can-style light comedy for DiCaprio? Not bloody likely. “I would love to do something even darker,” says DiCaprio with a devious smile. He knows he sounds slightly mad. “I don’t know, like how would you penetrate the mind of somebody like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver? There’s a word in German that they don’t have in the English language that’s called Schadenfreude. It means humiliation for somebody else.” He smirks. “It’s what I see sometimes when I watch certain politicians, but it can be done in movies, like when Travis Bickle takes [Cybill Shepherd] to the porno theatre for his first date. You’re like, ‘Oh, God, please don’t do this!’” “I work hard at trying to create a balance.” Successful? “We’ll see.” Advertisement He makes his excuses and stands up. It’s time to jump into a helicopter and check out the suburban sprawl that threatens the Everglades. He takes a puff on a vaping device, exuding a maple-syrup smell that makes me want pancakes. He pulls a watch cap over his eyes and ducks out through the restaurant’s service alley. His chauffeured Tesla peels out for the heliport. A man left behind speaks into a wrist device. “The package has left the building. I repeat: the package has left the building.” “Sure, everyone likes to be recognised, but that’s out of my hands — other people control those things,” DiCaprio tells me, as he preps for an interview with a hurricane expert. “I will say it would help the film, bring it to more people.” The Revenant is like free guacamole to hungry film critics, with the Birdman director, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, at the helm and the best living cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, shooting scenery that out-Malicks Terrence Malick. But there are only two female characters in the film. One is murdered; the other is gang-raped by French trappers. The film is 156 minutes long, and it becomes quickly evident that any white character not named Hugh Glass is going to make the worst possible moral choice imaginable. For DiCaprio, the roots of The Revenant and his environmental work all began with a meeting with the then vice-president Al Gore, in 1998. DiCaprio had grown up with a melancholy for extinct creatures. Advertisement “I remember the thing I got the most sad about when I was little was the loss of species that have been as a result of mankind’s intrusion on nature,” says DiCaprio, whose Los Angeles home features a massive fossil collection. “Like the quagga, or the Tasmanian tiger, or the dodo bird.” Titanic came out in 1997, and DiCaprio went from promising actor of his generation to one of the most famous faces on the planet. There was the requisite news of bawdy behaviour and a slew of model girlfriends, some of which still trickles out in the tabloids, as he remains single. You can ask him about it, but he will wave it off, saying: “I liked it when you went to see a movie and you didn’t know everything about the actor.” Like Warren Beatty, Robert Redford and Paul Newman before him, DiCaprio longed to be seen as something more than just a panty-dropper. A friend set up a meeting with Gore. The vice-president sketched out the planet and the atmosphere on a chalkboard and told the actor: “You want to be involved in environmental issues? This is the most important thing facing all of humanity and the future.” In the past decade, it has gone from passion to obsession. “I am consumed by this,” says DiCaprio. “There isn’t a couple of hours a day where I’m not thinking about it. It’s this slow burn. It’s not ‘aliens invading our planet next week and we have to get up and fight to defend our country,’ but it’s this inevitable thing, and it’s so terrifying.” A couple of years ago, DiCaprio met with a casual friend, the actor Fisher Stevens, once known as Michelle Pfeiffer’s ex, now an accomplished documentary producer. The two had become reacquainted while filming the disappearing reefs in the Galapagos, an event made memorable for DiCaprio’s scuba tank malfunctioning while shooting footage and DiCaprio desperately looking for someone to help him to the top. He (of course) found Ed Norton, who shared air with DiCaprio as they ascended slowly to avoid the bends. Stevens and DiCaprio talked of shooting a climate-change film that would feature DiCaprio as a man on a global pursuit for the truth. Advertisement Just as preproduction was starting for the doc, funding came through for The Revenant. Rather than pass on either project, DiCaprio chose to see a symmetry between the two, with Hugh Glass representing a man on the front end of the West’s destruction of the land and the extermination of other cultures, and DiCaprio’s documentary set two centuries later as the world faces the bill for all the raping and pillaging. Later, he put it more bluntly. “The big question is, is it all too late?” “I think I got too much sleep last night.” Stevens laughs. “That would be a first.” Advertisement DiCaprio is two-tracking obligations as details of The Revenant (still unreleased at the time) have started seeping out, and his camp has had to damp down rumours that he was sexually assaulted by a grizzly in one of the film’s gory passages (“That’s not what’s happening”). Then a veteran movie blogger said that he loved the film, but there was no way women were going to sit through the gorefest. “I think it’s silly, and I think that the women I’ve spoken to really enjoyed the movie,” says DiCaprio. After a quick hairbrush session, DiCaprio shifts into environmental-warrior mode. Stevens gives him a list of questions, but he largely wings it. First, DiCaprio and Levine talk of mutual friends, including the billionaire Russian construction magnate Vladislav Doronin. “Vlad is a lot of fun,” admits DiCaprio, adding how much he enjoys Doronin’s Aman Resorts, discrete seven-star accommodations scattered across the globe. Then DiCaprio asks Levine if he’s worried about declining real-estate prices. “I’m not going to preside over Miami Beach becoming Venice,” says Levine. “I think property levels are just going to continue to rise.” DiCaprio doesn’t agree, saying he’d already unloaded his beach house: “I wouldn’t take that bet.” The image of DiCaprio as an empty libertine gorging in his own garden of earthly delights — which has stuck since he rolled with a travelling pack of ruffians derisively labelled the Pussy Posse back in the 1990s — isn’t any more true or false than it was with leading-man predecessors such as Redford and George Clooney. (DiCaprio recently ended his relationship with the model Kelly Rohrbach, according to reports; before that, the best rumour was of a casual liaison with Rihanna.) There has been some twisted comeuppance: in 2005, DiCaprio had to get more than a dozen stitches to his billion-dollar face after a Hollywood Hills party when a former model slashed him with broken glass, a shot that may have been intended for someone else. Beneath that reputation is an actor who has been devoted to his craft since his early tweens. DiCaprio was partially raised by an underground artist, his father, George DiCaprio, a comic-book author and distributor. Leo grew up in Los Angeles, but not the Los Angeles of Hollywoodland. As a kid, he saw junkies in the alleyways and prostitutes at the nearby hotel. After a halcyon stay at a progressive school near UCLA, he returned to his neighbourhood school for junior high, where he was regularly beaten up. “I was a bit of a loudmouth, and I was in an environment where the elements aligned to have kids smack the hell outta me once in a while,” DiCaprio tells me with a smile. DiCaprio found refuge in drama classes and started hitting auditions, driven by his mother, Irmelin, his most patient supporter and critic. (She’s been known to critique the wardrobe authenticity in his films.) There were cattle calls, a Matchbox toy commercial and a year when he wasn’t cast in anything. He knew acting was what he wanted to do and started making friends at auditions with other dreamers, such as Tobey Maguire. “I’ve got plenty of new friends through the years, too, but I’ve held on to some of them for 25 years now,” says DiCaprio. “There’s an inherent comfort level that can’t be duplicated and can’t be manufactured. You don’t have to do catch-up interviews — they’re up to date.” It all changed when he beat Maguire and others to take the lead in an adaptation of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, starring opposite Robert De Niro. DiCaprio’s father had taken his boy to a screening of De Niro’s Midnight Run a few years earlier and told him, if he wanted to be an actor, De Niro was the one to watch. DiCaprio thought he blew the audition by screaming his lines, but De Niro liked his intensity. De Niro recommended DiCaprio to Scorsese, and when the actor and director worked together for the first time, on 2002’s Gangs of New York, it was a 26-year-old DiCaprio who was dispatched to Daniel Day-Lewis’s New York brownstone to try to lure him out of retirement, sitting with him on a Central Park bench and silently waiting for him to make the first move. DiCaprio is cagey about his next film, but he’s been casting about for a project that speaks to his politics. He dreams of releasing his documentary in tandem with The Revenant’s video release, and he has already optioned an unwritten book on the Volkswagen emissions scandal. There’s a great narrative film to be made about the environment, insists DiCaprio — it’s just a matter of finding the right project. “I don’t know how to crack this yet, but I would love to do something that isn’t about waves crashing on the Empire State Building,” he says. One thing is clear: he’s not going to retire and chain himself to the gate of a BP plant. There has to be a strategy. “I had a friend say, ‘Well, if you’re really this passionate about environmentalism, quit acting,’” he says. “But you soon realise that one hand shakes the other, and being an artist gives you a platform.” He pauses and offers his palms upward. “Not that necessarily people will take anything that I say seriously, but it gives you a voice.” One afternoon, DiCaprio is heading in the Tesla to another appointment, and he wants to make something very clear. “This is not my life,” says DiCaprio. He stares intently at me. “I’m not followed around by publicists, security guards, drivers and all that. That’s not my day-to-day life — it’s my professional life.” Talk moves to what he loves to do most: scuba dive in exotic locations. Even relying on the oxygen kindness of Edward Norton to survive hasn’t dampened his love. “It’s a hypnotic, unbelievably beautiful ecosystem that’s below the surface of the world we live in,” says DiCaprio, his face relaxing noticeably. “It’s a complete escape from absolutely everything.” After his appointment, he has a few hours of downtime with his art-gallery friends. On the way downtown, I mention that his intensity on global warming is, well, intense. “You noticed that, huh?” he says. “This has got to be the largest human movement in history, and it takes every religion, every country, every individual contributing to it.” We arrive at a ritzy gallery that shows no sign of the coming apocalypse. Security guards swarm the car. I begin to say goodbye, but DiCaprio puts his hand on my arm. “Don’t worry, I’m not jumping out of the car.” He continues on for a couple more minutes about a new ally in the fight. “We finally have a pope for the first time that is speaking through his encyclical and has aligned himself with modern science.” Someone knocks on the window. It’s time to go. DiCaprio opens the door, and the likely next winner of the Oscar for best actor is immediately engulfed in handlers. He turns back and shouts over his shoulder with a smile: “Nice talking to you, bro!” For just a moment, Leonardo DiCaprio looks like a kid without a care in the world.
NOT everything is so dark. There are still starlets, scuba diving and industrialist friends named Vlad with giant yachts. I ask him later if he’s afraid of slipping down into the gloaming, like some character from a movie about a doomed 1912 ocean liner.
HERE’S the transitory question on the table: is this the year Leonardo DiCaprio finally wins an Oscar, after four nominations?
STEVENS and his crew are setting up in the city-hall offices of the mayor of Miami Beach, Philip Levine, to ask him about how rising waters are threatening the city. DiCaprio arrives looking tired in a short-sleeved polka-dot blue shirt and droopy jeans exposing powder-blue boxers. He stretches theatrically.
WE’RE eating at a posh Miami restaurant, and a stray little girl wanders by, with no clue that she is eyeing one of the world’s most famous movie stars. DiCaprio takes off his sunglasses and offers a long “Aww”. I ask him if he sees time in his life for a family. He responds abruptly, for the first and only time in our two days together. “Do you mean do I want to bring children into a world like this?” says DiCaprio. “If it happens, it happens. I’d prefer not to get into specifics about it, just because then it becomes something that’s misquoted. But, yeah.” He shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “I don’t know. To articulate how I feel about it is just gonna be misunderstood.”
©2016 Rolling Stone. First published in Rolling Stone Magazine(R). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
