The role that saved Leonardo DiCaprio’s career: “I hated them all, I was ready to quit”
Starting out in Hollywood is a tough experience for anyone, but especially for those who begin acting as young people. The business is infamously brutal, with an endless stream of rejections while being told not to ‘take it personally’ and pitted against hundreds of other people looking for the same dream. But for child actors, this process is especially confusing, with Leonardo DiCaprio describing his early experiences in the industry and struggles to get his foot in the door, despite now being one of the biggest names in the business.
From his long-lasting relationship with Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, playing the infamous Rick Dalton in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, the actor quickly skyrocketed to fame as a teenager, finding success through early roles in The Basketball Diaries and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. But while he might be the most sought-after film star working today, his journey to the top wasn’t always easy, with the actor describing the one role that prevented him from calling it quits.
For many aspiring actors, the process of auditioning can be demoralising and completely soul-destroying, walking into rooms where the casting directors barely acknowledge your presence and dismiss you after letting you perform one second of a monologue. For DiCaprio, the beginning of his career was the most challenging, struggling to find work and becoming bitter from his experiences.
When discussing this, the actor described one meeting with a casting agent at the age of 11 that he found particularly scarring, saying, “I remember them lining us up like cattle. There were eight boys. A woman comes up and says, ‘OK, no, no, yes, yes, no, no, no, yes. Thank you.'” However, much to his dismay, Leonardo was considered a ‘no’, saying, “I thought that that was my one chance into the business and that the community was now against me.”
From this point onwards, he felt jaded and rejected by the industry, trying to land small roles and commercials but struggling to book anything substantial. The actor explained, “I hadn’t gotten a job in a year and a half,” he says. “That’s like over a hundred auditions. You get pretty disillusioned. One day, I just decided I hated everyone. I hated all these casting directors. I hated them all…I was ready to quit.”
However, just before resigning himself to failure and giving up entirely, DiCaprio was offered a role in a television adaptation of Steve Martin’s 1989 film Parenthood, which was his first major on-screen role before landing a supporting role alongside Robert De Niro in This Boy’s Life. It was just a few years later that he received his first Academy Award nomination for his role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.
Based on the film by Ron Howard, the director executive produced an adaptation for the screen, running for just one year in 1990. The series was one of many films that producers tried to translate into the sitcom format, with the show following the ups and downs of raising children and four generations of the Merrick family in California.
Despite its short-lived success, only running for twelve episodes in total, it became famous for launching DiCaprio’s career, something that many lesser-known films and series from this era have been known for doing, even if the stories didn’t make the intended splash.
While the initial grind might have been gruelling, the challenge of this industry exists so that it weeds out people who are committed and those who are in it for the wrong reasons, with the rejections only affirming DiCaprio’s love for the medium and determination to make it happen.
