How “the drunkest man in the world” inspired Leonardo DiCaprio for a perfect scene
Leonardo DiCaprio has been establishing himself as a monumental actor for decades now. Long gone are the days when he was thought of simply as a heartthrob guaranteed to bring in a certain amount of box office sales for his twinkling eyes alone. These days, he is a well-respected, Academy Award-winning thespian. While never openly committing to any single acting practice, like Method or otherwise, he has clearly picked up inspiration across the years.
For the most part, that has been the work of other actors. Having routinely leant on the lessons he learned from his co-stars, like Robert De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis and Meryl Streep — whom he called the greatest ever — DiCaprio has developed himself into a well-rounded performer, as able to deliver heroic moments in The Departed as he is vulnerable ones in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, the star’s acting chops have been as rounded as a Christmas ham for some time now.
Across his growing career, DiCaprio has produced some truly vibrant scenes worth locking up in the vault of cinematic brilliance. His meta performance as Rick Dalton in the show-within-the-movie Lancer is one of the most captivating of his career. There are also nods for his performance as the despicable Calvin Candie in Django Unchained as he asks “What’s it gonna be Doc?” as well as more than a few heartwrenching romantic dalliances in Titanic. However, one of his most underrated scenes occurs in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Rather than his triumphant refusal to leave the company, it is the moment we see Jordan Belfort, a well-rounded drug taker, incapacitated by quaaludes (a notably powerful tranquilliser) as he tries to drive his car away from the country club and back home. The scene has a habit of entertaining audiences as DiCaprio staggers and struggles to cope with the debilitating of the drugs as they take control of his faculties.
It has been suggested that the scene operates as a tool for Scorsese to show the audience the ugliness at the centre of Belfort’s conflict, as he struggles to move away from the idyllic home of his lavish arrogance and desire for capitalist superiority in an attempt to reach the safety of home life. While the scene’s subtext may be highly-prized intellectual fare, it is buoyed by DiCaprio’s wonderfully slapstick performance.
During an interview session about the movie, the actor is asked who his inspiration for the performance was, with Buster Keaton and Jerry Lewis offered as options. However, DiCaprio revealed the truth was a little more lowbrow: “I had a guy on YouTube that I watched. It was entitled ‘The Drunkest Man in the World’.”
“It was not just the fact that he was, you know, sort of elasticated and try to get… It was his motivation which really intrigued me,” the actor continued as earnestly as possible. “He had one singular goal, and that was to get a beer out of the 7-Eleven, and he was writhing around the floor just trying.”
Even from these words it is easy to see how his scene as Belfort is connected ot this clip, as he continues: “And he just wouldn’t stop reaching for something that was a life-sustaining force for him. You think you are operating the same way but the mechanics of what your brain thinks and what your body actually physically manifests are two entirely different things.”
It’s not often that an Oscar-winning actor will point to a singular thing as the reason behind their magnetic performance. It’s an even rarer occasion for that inspiration to be an ancient YouTube clip of an exceedingly drunk man trying to buy a beer.
