Leonardo DiCaprio reveals the most difficult part of his ‘Django Unchained’ role
Following the success of 1993’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, Leonardo DiCaprio started making a name for himself as one of Hollywood’s most treasured leading men. After starring in The Basketball Diaries and Agnieszka Holland’s erotic drama Total Eclipse, he landed the role of Jack Dawson in James Cameron’s Titanic. The film made him a huge star, and he could have taken the easy road, appearing as the roughish love interest in lavish costume dramas until the end of time. Instead, he chose to expand his range, taking on challenging roles in films like The Beach, Blood Diamond and, eventually, Django Unchained.
Directed by Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained stars Jamie Foxx as Django, a slave who, having been separated from his wife, winds up accompanying a bounty hunter called Dr King on his mission to capture the Brittle brothers. On succeeding, King frees Django, at which point they set about hunting down the South’s most-wanted criminals. Their quest leads them to the plantation of the sadistic Calvin Candie – played by Leonardo DiCaprio – where Django finds his wife is still working as a slave.
As the owner of the fourth largest cotton plantation in Mississippi, Candie is a truly despicable character. When Django and Schultz first arrive at the Cleopatra Club, he’s watching two slaves fight to the death. After the winning slave successfully kills his rival, Candie congratulates him by buying him a drink from a well-stocked bar. During a conversation with CNN to promote Django Unchained, DiCaprio was open about how challenging he’d found the role. “I’ve never, ever read in my career anyone this narcissistic, this horrendous, this racist, this self-indulgent,” he began.
“It was almost like a young Louis XIV of the South,” DiCaprio continued. “He really represented everything that was wrong with plantation owners and slave owners at the time, all combined into one. So to sort of wrap my head around sort of treating other people that way, and putting my mind into somebody else’s mind like that, was the most difficult part.”
Leading man Jamie Foxx also found the making of Django Unchained a gruelling process. According to the actor, Quentin Tarantino gave him some brutally honest notes early on in the shoot. During an interview with Howard Stern, he said, “I was just getting to learn Quentin Tarantino, so he was, again, a tyrant,” Foxx began. “He was like, ‘do not fuck my film up’. But that’s what you want. You want a director who, even if you’re going off the cliff, you know you’re going off the fucking cliff.”
Foxx continued: “On the first day of rehearsal, I’m reading my lines like [hums], and he said cut and closed the door and was like, ‘umm, what the fuck was that?’ I said, ‘what do you mean?’ He said, ‘I knew I was gonna have this problem. Listen, all of this shit – you have to be a fucking slave. He’s a slave. He’s not cool, he’s a fucking slave. He doesn’t know how to read. You come in with your fucking Louis [Vuitton] bag and your fucking range rover and you’re just like ‘I’m so fucking cool’. Well, you’re not James Brown, he’s a fucking slave, and then he becomes the hero. But lose that shit first.'”
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