Why Leonardo DiCaprio was cut from his first-ever movie: “They completely edited me out”
Countless actors who’d go on to become major stars began their film careers by appearing in a terrible horror movie, and while Leonardo DiCaprio is one of them, it wasn’t supposed to be that way.
Much like fellow Academy Award winners Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Hilary Swank, Brad Pitt, and Charlize Theron, DiCaprio caught one of his earliest breaks in a bargain basement tale of terror when his first credited role in a movie came in 1991’s Critters 3, which was banished straight to video.
He doesn’t have the fondest memories of the experience, calling it “possibly one of the worst films of all time,” but he didn’t have to wait too long to make his mark when What’s Eating Gilbert Grape started production 11 months after Critters 3 was released, culminating in his first Oscar nomination.
By then, it was already clear that DiCaprio was a precocious talent who had the potential to become one of his generation’s best, which is exactly what he did. By the time he was in his early 20s, he was a worldwide phenomenon and one of the most famous people on the planet, which softened the blow of his first time stepping foot on a movie set being utterly pointless.
Before he’d shot Critters 3, DiCaprio was cast as Guy in director Katt Shea’s erotic thriller Poison Ivy, which finds Sara Gilbert’s Sylvie Cooper forge a friendship with Drew Barrymore’s Ivy. The latter seduces the former’s father and plots to kill her mother and frame Sylvie for the crime, and DiCaprio initially had plenty of dialogue to wrap his laughing gear around.
“My first role in an actual movie was with Sara Gilbert and Drew Barrymore, and it was called Poison Ivy,” he told Marc Maron when clarifying his actual feature debut. “And I had a whole monologue insulting Sara Gilbert, and I messed up my lines. I think I was 12 or 13 years old.
“Screwed up my lines and then they said, ‘OK, kid, just walk in an look at her and say, ‘Problems,'” he continued. “I said, ‘Just problems?’ And I walked in and said, ‘Problems’. That was my line, and then they cut that out of the movie. So, I’m not in the movie at all. My first role, I’m actually not in at all. They completely edited me out.”
He’d gone from having a monologue to having his contributions cut down to a solitary line, but the post-production scissors ensured he didn’t even get that. DiCaprio has probably never seen Poison Ivy in its entirety for that reason, but it’s not completely accurate that he was “completely edited out” of the film.
Not that it’s a moment to remember either, seeing as he gets roughly two seconds of screentime walking out of a door and then out of shot. Ironically, he already had his maiden voyage into cinema under his belt by the time Poison Ivy arrived in theatres, with Critters 3‘s December 1991 bow on home video coming a month before Shea’s flick premiered at Sundance and five months before it hit the big screen, where it promptly bombed amid a sea of unenthusiastic reviews.
