The 2010 phone call from Leonardo DiCaprio that won Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar: “Never told me to this day what he said”
There’s being an actor with plenty of pull in the industry, and then there’s being an actor who convinces one of their peers to play a part they’d already turned down, which they’d ultimately win an Academy Award for playing, which just goes to show how much power Leonardo DiCaprio wields.
He’s been one of cinema’s most famous and highest-paid faces since the ‘Leomania’ craze erupted in the late 1990s, but he’s far from the most self-centred A-lister in Hollywood. When you’ve achieved what he has, there’s always going to be at least a little bit of ego, but he doesn’t mind doing favours for friends.
As Leonardo DiCaprio, those friends tend to be in higher places than most, and when an industry legend was staring defeat squarely in the face as their passion project threatened to go up in smoke, the Wolf of Wall Street star volunteered his services, toppling the first domino toward Oscar-winning success.
After working together for the first, and still only, time on 2002’s Catch Me If You Can, DiCaprio was aware that Steven Spielberg was desperate to bring Abraham Lincoln’s story to the big screen. The year after their breezy heist caper was released, the filmmaker offered the title role to Daniel Day-Lewis, who turned it down.
Moving to Plan B, Liam Neeson was cast as Lincoln in 2005, and given that his solitary Oscar nomination came from headlining a Spielberg-helmed historical biographical drama, it was a solid compromise. However, by the summer of 2010, the Schindler’s List frontman was convinced that he’d aged out of being able to play the character, urging the director to give him the boot.
He did, which left Spielberg in the unfortunate position of having to find a new Lincoln, again. As fate would have it, DiCaprio was the right person in the right place at the right time, and knowing Day-Lewis, or knowing him as much as anyone can, given his method antics, he offered to lend a helping hand.
“Leo DiCaprio was at my house for dinner one night; it was just myself, my wife, and Leo,” Spielberg reminisced. “And he says, ‘Hey, what’s going on with your Lincoln project? I told him the sad story. I had one shot at Daniel, and he had declined. And that was that. Leo just listened.”
They finished what were almost certainly luxurious desserts, DiCaprio went home, and Spielberg assumed that was the end of the conversation. Of course, it was not. “The next morning, he called me at my office,” he explained. “He said, ‘Here’s Daniel’s cell phone number, he’s expecting your call’. Leo has never told me to this day what he said to Daniel.”
Thanks to a chinwag with the Amsterdam Vallon to his Bill the Butcher, Day-Lewis changed his mind and agreed to be Spielberg’s Abraham Lincoln. As he tends to do, he claimed ‘Best Actor’ at the Oscars for his efforts, with DiCaprio’s phone call the deciding factor in ending his resistance to headlining the biopic.
