The “emotionally painful” 2008 role that almost broke Leonardo DiCaprio: “It was depressing”
For us non-actors, it’s easy to watch a movie with pretty hefty themes because we can just switch a movie off if we don’t feel like we can feel the burden of witnessing these scenes play out, but what about the actors who actually had to shoot the film?
Of course, a scene is often broken down by lots of repetitive takes and, in some instances, the thing that really makes a scene scary, for example, are the special effects added in post-production. Yet it can still take its toll on an actor when a movie requires them to immerse themselves in a narrative full of pain, anguish, and suffering. This is always going to have an effect on even the most well-adjusted of performers.
For legendary star Leonardo DiCaprio, it was a certain Kate Winslet collaboration that left him relieved that shooting was over, although it’s not the one that first springs to mind. A decade after they made tears flow in Titanic, the pair reunited for an adaptation of Revolutionary Road from American Beauty filmmaker Sam Mendes, a cinematic offering of Richard Yates’ novel about a 1950s suburban tragedy.
It’s a truly heartbreaking book, one that follows the deterioration of a marriage with a focus on themes like gender roles within the rigidity of American capitalist society and abortions being illegal. DiCaprio and Winslet were the perfect casting choices for the roles of Frank and April Wheeler, but that doesn’t mean that the film didn’t push the American actor to his limits.
“It was one of the more emotionally painful movies. It was depressing, making this film, I have to say,” he revealed via The Playlist, “As great as it was to work with Kate, I was happy to get out of…not happy to wrap the film, but happy to stop arguing with my wife for months straight, confined in a tiny suburban house. We were really shooting in a tiny little house, and the entire crew was there, smashed into this little two-bedroom house.”
The suffocating nature of the experience, which resulted in terrific performances from both of them, always on the precipice of utter collapse, was not one that DiCaprio would wish on anyone.
“There was no way to get out; there was nowhere to run,” he said, “The claustrophobia was pretty intense after a while. After 18 months of work, I’m trying to figure out what normal life is like again”.
The movie was a success, although DiCaprio and Winslet failed to gain Oscar nominations for their performances. Instead, it was Michael Shannon who would come out on top, earning a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ nomination, although he lost out to Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight.
Following the release of Revolutionary Road, DiCaprio didn’t appear in another film until 2010’s Shutter Island, one of many collaborations between him and Martin Scorsese, and it makes you wonder whether that two-year absence from the screen had anything to do with just how demanding the experience of shooting Mendes’ film was.
