The actor who refused to work with Leonardo DiCaprio: “He had never been a second banana”
Most actors would accept that when they agree to star in a movie that features Leonardo DiCaprio, they aren’t going to be the focal point. However, on one occasion, it turned out to be a deal-breaker that caused the entire production to fall apart.
Having been nestled comfortably among the industry’s elite since the late 1990s, not to mention his impressive box office track record, status as one of Hollywood’s highest-paid names, and a seven-time Academy Award nominee and one-time winner, not many stars take top billing over DiCaprio. In fact, it’s only happened once in the last three decades.
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is the only film he’s been in since 1998 where his name didn’t come first in the credits, and he’s made 21 features since then, which is essentially the textbook definition of a leading man, and there was no chance Jamie Foxx wouldn’t take top honours when he was the title character. And yet, another proposed co-star wasn’t sold on the prospect of ceding the spotlight.
In a way, it makes sense, since that proposed co-star was Shah Rukh Khan. He might not be a household name in the United States, but in terms of how successful his filmography has been over a number of years, and how much money he’s earned from it, the Bollywood legend can deservedly be called one of modern cinema’s biggest global superstars.
The prospect of him teaming up with DiCaprio was a tantalising one, especially with Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese thrown into the mix. Khan may have never lent himself to an American film, but he came kind of close when he was eying a team-up with those three Hollywood mainstays to make Xtreme City.
When the high-powered quartet met in person to discuss the project, which would have largely been shot in India, Schrader realised that Khan had become accustomed to a level of creative control and oversight that wasn’t going to sit too well with DiCaprio, his directorial muse, and his Taxi Driver screenwriter.
“He hires directors,” Schrader told Pod Casty for Me. “Sometimes he hires multiple directors; he’ll hire somebody else for the musical number; he’ll hire somebody else for the action; he’ll hire somebody else for the personal relationship scenes. He can do that. He has never really worked under the harness of an auteur, and that, I could see, was starting to grate on him.”
He wasn’t only bristling at the idea of taking orders from Scorsese, which sounds ridiculous when he’s Martin fucking Scorsese, but since he hadn’t done much work outside of his native India, and definitely not with American movie stars, “he had never been a second banana to somebody like Leo before.”
As Schrader continued his conversations with Khan, he “could feel the ground slowly eroding underneath him” as he realised his endeavours would be fruitless. He became increasingly non-committal, and ultimately, Xtreme City gradually fell into the ether of development hell, never to be seen or heard from again.
