The only thing Leonardo DiCaprio hated about working for Quentin Tarantino
Though he’s very much considered Martin Scorsese’s boy these days—much to the chagrin of Robert De Niro—Leonardo DiCaprio has worked with just about every other famous director worth their salt. He made Catch Me If You Can with Steven Spielberg, The Great Gatsby and Romeo + Juliet with Baz Luhrmann, and The Revenant with Alejandro G Iñárritu. Then there are his two collaborations with Quentin Tarantino.
In 2012, the heartthrob played ‘Monsieur’ Calvin J Candie, a sadistic ranch owner in Tarantino’s bloodthirsty Western Django Unchained. For a man who rarely plays an out-and-out villain, DiCaprio excels in the role of the unhinged yet devilishly intelligent slave owner. After an eight-year hiatus, the two Hollywood powerhouses teamed up once again for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. This time, DiCaprio played Rick Dalton, a former TV star struggling to adapt to the end of the 1960s.
The late ’60s on film is usually associated with frolic and exhuberance—snappy clothes, funky music, free love, and cars that prioritised style over fuel efficiency and safety. Even though Dalton isn’t a superstar, he’s still a semi-famous actor of the time, which you’d think would have made playing him a dream come true. Unfortunately for DiCaprio, there was one thing getting in the way of his good time—his fake moustache.
“The moustache drove Leo mad,” claimed Siân Grigg in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Grigg is a Welsh makeup artist who has worked with Leo on some of his biggest projects. She provided facial effects for The Revenant, the movie that finally bagged Leo his long-awaited Oscar for ‘Best Actor’. For Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it was her job to transform her client into a spaghetti western-style cowboy villain for a number of scenes. This involved a moustache that, in her view, was accurate to the time.
“I had to leave it really long, and it always went in his mouth,” Grigg revealed. “It was so hot out, and the moustache kept going in his mouth, and he’d be spitting it out. He did the same thing in the scene as they filmed ‘off camera’ when he was supposed to be losing it a bit. It made us laugh as he kept spitting it out and the wig was quite long as well.”
According to Grigg, whose non-Leo projects include Saving Private Ryan and 28 Days Later, she wasn’t concerned with making the upper-lip warmer look realistic. “They didn’t have good materials back then like we do now,” she said. “It was correct for the period—a western film being made in the ’70s. We were copying the style of films shot in that period and also covering Leo’s character up to look different and unrecognisable, which in the movie he’s not used to.”
Dalton is forced to take a gig in a cowboy movie that he thinks is beneath him in order to make ends meet. His face is obscured by his ridiculous facial hair, a sore spot for the one-time idol. Unfortunately, life imitated art, and the real megastar began to despise his phony face fluff.
The effort and thought Grigg put into DiCaprio’s prosthetic is the perfect example of how much skill it takes to be a makeup artist in Hollywood. It’s a severely underrated part of filmmaking, which is a crying shame.
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