The role Leonardo DiCaprio hated every second of playing: “I wanted to bash my head against the wall”
One of the many positives that come with being Leonardo DiCaprio is that it’s been a long time since he’s had to do anything he didn’t want to do, placing the actor in rarefied air as one of the select names in Hollywood who are able to write their own ticket.
He makes the movies he wants with the directors he wants to work with, and he’s driven by art instead of commerce. There aren’t many actors in a similar position, which means that unless he’s planning to put himself through the wringer for something like The Revenant again, his days of truly suffering for his art are over until he decides otherwise.
Of course, that hasn’t always been the case, and it isn’t for any performer who hasn’t yet become a household name and cinematic superstar. Even when DiCaprio’s post-Titanic fame was at its highest, he hadn’t yet proven himself as one of his generation’s best, which led to a couple of notable missteps.
The way things have always worked is that once an actor becomes a known quantity, they’re almost immediately pitched into a big-budget blockbuster with a starry ensemble cast. Sure enough, his first film after James Cameron’s cultural phenomenon was Randall Wallace’s The Man in the Iron Mask, co-starring Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, Gabriel Byrne, Hugh Laurie, and more.
It wasn’t the most inspired career move, seeing as Alexandre Dumas’ novel had already been adapted dozens of times before, but thanks to his residual Titanic allure, it was a hit. It also holds an unwanted place among his back catalogue, with DiCaprio’s dual role as King Louis XIV and his twin brother, Philippe Bourbon, winning him his only Razzie for ‘Worst Screen Couple’.
He didn’t have a problem playing the monarch, but when it came to his sibling, the titular character who’d been locked away and swept under the rug of history, he hated every second that he had to wear the character’s signature apparel. “Within ten minutes of wearing the mask, I wanted to bash my head against the wall in frustration,” he told The Standard.
“I wore it for a while until it became part of me,” DiCaprio explained. “I had to fight urges to scratch my face off. I would have had a nervous breakdown if I’d had to go through a movie for three months and be that character, or in this case, characters, on and off set. When they say, ‘Cut’, I’m off. I want to joke around.”
Was it worth it? Probably not. While he didn’t have to spend a massive amount of time trapped in his cranial iron prison, winning a Razzie doesn’t equate with the turmoil he went through. DiCaprio didn’t have a problem with The Man in the Iron Mask when he was shooting his Louis XIV scenes, but as soon as the time came to disappear that handsome face of his and clamp it shut inside a metallic tomb, he was immediately on the verge of losing it.
