The only role Leonardo DiCaprio would consider reprising: “It would be fun”
Like a younger, more bankable, and more awards-laden version of Kevin Bacon, Leonardo DiCaprio has gone through his entire career without playing the same role twice, not that many of his movies lend themselves to sequels, spinoffs, or spiritual successors.
Technically, Bacon did reprise a role, but nobody saw it, and technically, DiCaprio made his feature debut in a sequel, but he’d much prefer if everyone swept Critters 3 under the rug and pretended it never existed. In an age of franchises and intellectual property obsession, he’s the only A-lister in Hollywood who’s managed to stay at the top of the ladder without at least one multi-film series to their name.
Looking at his filmography, there aren’t many titles that stand out as being ripe for sequelisation. Inception, maybe, but Christopher Nolan wouldn’t do it. Brad Pitt returned for David Fincher’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood follow-up, but DiCaprio didn’t. The Revenant? He’d never put himself through that again, even if Hugh Glass did embark upon further expeditions after his ordeal.
He didn’t want to be Spider-Man or Robin in the 1990s, he turned down the chance to be George Lucas’ Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels, and he had “lot of great ideas” about potentially playing Zack Snyder’s Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and the longer his career wears on, the less likely it is that he’ll ever succumb to the lure of a cinematic universe.
However, he would be willing to make an exception, after informing E! News that “it would be fun to do more Wolf of Wall Street stuff.” Martin Scorsese’s ode to the excess and debauchery that plagued New York’s financial sphere in the 1980s contains arguably the single finest performance that DiCaprio has ever given, and he got along well with Jordan Belfort, so it’s easy to see why he’d entertain the idea.
Is there enough meat on those narrative bones to make it worthwhile, though? He’s too old for a prequel, and Belfort’s rise up the ranks was pretty well-covered anyway. After being released from prison in 2000 after serving a 22-month sentence, he’s written a follow-up to his memoir, worked as a motivational speaker, had his cryptocurrency wallet robbed of $300,000, and been embroiled in a training programme scam in Australia, none of which seems worthy of a sequel.
Every worthwhile beat of Belfort’s meteoric rise and sudden fall has already been seen in The Wolf of Wall Street, and it’s hard to imagine there being much untold story left to tell. If Scorsese was on board, that might change things, but he’s got enough on his plate already without joining DiCaprio in the debutants club for making a sequel to one of his own movies for the first time.
It’s probably not going to happen, but knowing how Hollywood works, if one of the industry’s biggest stars has said he’d be interested in reprising the role of Belfort in another film, somebody somewhere will inevitably try and make it a reality, as unlikely as it seems.
