The breakfast cereal responsible for Leonardo DiCaprio’s entire career: “That kept on being my driving force”
For the last three decades, Leonardo DiCaprio has been one of the biggest names in the business, and for at least the last two, he’s been regarded as one of its finest actors. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to get to that point, but never let it be forgotten that a breakfast cereal was responsible.
Not because he religiously devoured a bowl every morning, although he might have done so, seeing as everybody knows that it’s the most important meal of the day, but because a humble brand of sugary toasted wheat snacks lit a fire under him and inspired him to become the best actor he could be.
It might scan as a ridiculous way of surmising how the fresh-faced and cherubic child star evolved into a tenured A-lister with an impressive track record of box office success and awards season recognition, but they were his words, not ours. DiCaprio may have started young, but for a brief spell, he wasn’t even the most successful youngster in his family.
After his parents got divorced, his father, George, remarried Peggy Farrar. She had a son, Adam, who was three years Leo’s senior. Long before DiCaprio made his screen debut in two episodes of the 1989 TV series, The New Lassie, his stepbrother had amassed close to a dozen film and television credits.
“We were in the poorhouse,” the regular Martin Scorsese collaborator told Premiere in 1996. “I would walk to my playground and see, like, a guy open up his trench coat with a thousand syringes.” Money was tight in the household, but when Farrar landed a part in a commercial for Golden Grahams, his step-sibling’s eyes were suddenly wide open.
“I asked my dad how much Adam made from it,” he recalled. “He said, ‘About $50,000’. Fifty thousand dollars! It just kept going through my head: my brother has $50,000! And that kept on being my driving force. I just remember for, like, five years thinking my brother was better than me because he had that.”
Fuelled by a combination of his drive to become an actor and his determination to eclipse Farrar as the highest-earning child at home, DiCaprio wanted to go at least one step beyond his stepbrother. Needless to say, he’s gone several steps beyond and then some, which would have been the case even if their relationship hadn’t grown increasingly fraught as the years progressed.
DiCaprio and Farrar were close growing up, but after the latter fell out of acting in the late 1990s, he had several brushes with the law, including an arrest on drug charges. In 2016, he claimed that his stepbrother “started surrounding himself with people that didn’t want me around,” which led to him being “slowly shut out of his world.”
It’s not the happiest ending to the story, but as DiCaprio remembers it, the paycheque Farrar landed for his Golden Grahams commercial was the driving force behind launching himself headlong into acting and giving it everything he’s got, and it would be an understatement to say he’s achieved more than he could have ever dreamed of back then.
