How the 1993 movie Leonardo DiCaprio turned down became his defining moment: “I won the fucking lottery”
It’s probably safe to say now that in modern cinema, Leonardo DiCaprio can take his place as this century’s acting equivalent to the greats of the past, the likes of Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Dustin Hoffman: he’s simply been too good in too many historic movies not to be.
Yes, he’s been able to take his pick of scripts for a long time now, but he doesn’t go the easy route, he deliberately chooses projects that he feels will challenge him to up his game consistently, to take what he does to new levels, and that’s been borne out in every decade he’s been doing it, from Romeo + Juliet to Catch Me if You Can to The Wolf of Wall Street to One Battle After Another.
There wasn’t too much doubt that DiCaprio was a special talent, not when he scooped Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations at just 18 for the 1993 drama What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, but the more interesting about his taking that movie on is that he could have gone down a much more commercial, safer route, on a mainstream film that he turned down in order to work alongside Depp.
It was one or the other, and he made his choice. “That other movie was Hocus Pocus,” he shared. “This whole thing, there is a lot of luck and timing. But that’s not all of it. You know that quote, ‘We stand on the shoulders of giants?’ Had I not had a contemplation, or an understanding, of all the greatness that had been done in cinema, had I not given myself a cinematic history lesson, on my own, I wouldn’t have known what to compare it to.”
Proving that he had an old head on young shoulders, or that perhaps he simply wasn’t thinking as sensibly as most might at the time, DiCaprio celebrated getting the part in Gilbert Grape despite it paying much less money than Hocus Pocus, indicating that even at a young age, he prioritised art over commerce.
“I really wanted that part,” he said of the former. “I look back, and I don’t know how I, at that point, could have made that decision. I still didn’t have a home. We were renting a house.” He was even subconsciously influenced by his future muse, with his prior role in This Boy’s Life sending him down the Scorsese/De Niro rabbit hole.
“After watching those movies, I just felt, ‘Holy shit, I’ve got one shot to be in this business, and I got a movie with Robert De Niro,'” the star recalled. “I won the fucking lottery. So what are you going to do with that, kid? You have this path in front of you… ‘Who knows?’” He knew what he was going to do, and it wasn’t starring in Hocus Pocus.
The path he followed led to a career that has grossed billions at the box office despite never appearing in a franchise, and during which he has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning once for 2016’s The Revenant and 15 Golden Globes, winning three. And 31 years after This Boy’s Life, he was still acting opposite De Niro, in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which picked up ten Oscar nods.
DiCaprio’s next movie is going to be his latest collaboration with Scorsese, titled What Happens at Night, a psychological thriller opposite Jennifer Lawrence about a couple travelling to Europe in order to adopt a baby, only to find themselves in a hotel that warps their sense of reality.
