Leonardo DiCaprio’s four favourite actors: “He was, dare I say it, the best”
It’s hard to remember a time before Leonardo DiCaprio, as it seems like every generation has their own image of him.
From fresh-faced breakout to Oscar-chasing star to the fascinating diversification he’s currently going through, he is a perfect case study when it comes to analysing an actor’s career, with an interesting personal life to boot.
His pomp arguably came during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when, once Titanic, a film Leo’s never seen, by the way, smashed box office records like they were icebergs in 1997, he was inescapable. Not all of his projects were successful (anyone remember The Man in the Iron Mask?), but he would spend the next decade or so building his legacy and establishing himself as the juggernaut he is today.
Three years after Titanic, DiCaprio sat down with Rolling Stone for a blockbuster interview, who questioned him on everything from his films to his love life to how he was handling fame. They wanted to know who he’d been rubbing elbows with in Hollywood and, more importantly, whose elbows he wanted to rub next.
“In terms of people now, oh, God, who haven’t I met?” he said, with a not-so-humble brag, “I’d love to meet Marlon Brando”. When the publication informed him that most young actors gave the same response, Leo simply replied, “He was, dare I say it, the best”.
DiCaprio has made no secret of the fact that he worships at the altar of Brando: as well as publicly confessing his love for the controversial great, he’s borrowed from his playbook many times. We all know that the star of The Godfather helped popularise the technique of method acting, and DiCaprio helped bring it into the modern age, going to extreme lengths to make his performances as ‘real’ as possible. Leo was even gifted Brando’s Oscar for On the Waterfront by a wealthy financier, until he realised he was dodgy as hell and relinquished the statuette to the police.
Rolling Stone thought they had a ‘gotcha’ moment when they reminded DiCaprio that he once said he preferred James Dean to Brando, another thing the One Battle After Another star hasn’t been shy about either. He was once in the running to play Dean in a film about his life, but those plans never materialised, so in response to why he said he’d prefer to meet Brando instead of the leather-clad teen idol, DiCaprio said, “Well, he’s gone, isn’t he?” Fair enough.
Leo had two more names he wanted to praise, highlighting, “I think Jim Carrey’s a genius. If he died today, he’d be regarded like Peter Sellers squared. And [Robert] De Niro. He’s probably the most influential.” Obviously, that last name is the most interesting as this was two years before DiCaprio made his first film with Martin Scorsese, and over time, would come to rival De Niro as the director’s favourite son, a perceived conflict that was even the subject of a 2015 short film called The Audition.
As for Carrey, they’ve never been in a scripted movie together, but there’s still plenty of time for that to change, and maybe the former can get his admirer a gig in the next Sonic the Hedgehog movie.
