The 1988 movie that showed Leonardo DiCaprio what a great actor looks like: “He’s that guy”
Every actor has to find inspiration from somewhere, and usually it comes at a young age. You see someone on screen and fall headfirst for their magnetic presence. ‘I want to be like that,’ you say. But only a select few have the ambition to follow in their hero’s footsteps.
Leonardo DiCaprio has always had that drive, which set him up to become one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed stars – a heartthrob, a muse, an Academy Award winner. He ticks all of the boxes, having turned in performances in some pretty epic blockbusters, while also emphasising a desire for artistic and considered roles – rarely will you see him in something like a cash-grabbing franchise.
But would he have gotten to such an impressive level if he hadn’t seen a certain movie as a teenager… When he was young, his father took him to the cinema, and there he saw a performance that would change everything for him, and soon enough, he’d be sharing the screen with the actor, as if it was destined to happen from the very beginning.
Talking to CBS News, he explained that Robert De Niro had a huge impact on him when he was just starting out in the industry, “I remember my father taking me, I believe it was maybe to Midnight Run, and saying, ‘You want to know what a great actor is? You want to watch a great actor, Leonardo?’ I go, ‘Yeah. Yeah. Sure.’ ‘He’s that guy right there.’”
Released in 1988, it clearly left an impression on the hopeful young actor because he would make his screen debut the following year in two episodes of the show The New Lassie. DiCaprio would then make his movie debut with the awful direct-to-video Critters 3, followed by a small role in the Drew Barrymore erotic thriller Poison Ivy, but then, as luck would have it, a chance to work with De Niro would be right around the corner.
The actor’s first major movie role was in 1993’s This Boy’s Life, with DiCaprio playing a young boy with behavioural issues, taking a specific dislike to his mother’s new boyfriend, played by De Niro. He was 18 years old at the time, and he couldn’t believe that he was suddenly sharing a screen with someone as legendary as De Niro for his first leading role.
Interestingly, about a decade later, DiCaprio would become Martin Scorsese’s latest muse, landing roles in the likes of Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and The Departed. De Niro wasn’t in any of these movies, appearing to take a break from his own longstanding partnership with Scorsese, but the pair finally united for a Scorsese collaboration in 2023 with Killers of the Flower Moon.
It was a real pinch-me moment for DiCaprio, who’d become fascinated with the pair’s collaborative relationship since he’d first been cast alongside De Niro all those years before. “And as soon as I got This Boy’s Life with De Niro, I obsessively watched all of their films together. And, you know, that’s a very impressionable age.”
Concluding, “And when you watch films like that, the threshold of what they accomplished, the bar is set so high that you sort of say, ‘OK. I gotta dig deep. And I wanna do something close to this good in my lifetime.’”
DiCaprio certainly achieved his aim, arguably becoming his generation’s own De Niro. The actor proved to be the perfect role model for DiCaprio – but let’s just hope that the One Battle After Another star doesn’t follow in the footsteps of De Niro’s gross old man comedies that he has come to favour in recent years.
