Watch a baby-faced Leonardo DiCaprio audition for ‘The Outsiders’
A lot of child actors wind up becoming faintly deranged. Leonardo DiCaprio escaped that fate by not being a particularly successful one. His early roles in sitcoms and low-budget creature features were a far cry from Home Alone. In fact, it wasn’t until his critically-acclaimed performance in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? that his star began to rise, by which point he was 19. Leo went on to cement himself as the heartthrob of the 1990s. Here, we’ll be revisiting one of his earliest auditions for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders.
Based on S. E. Hinton’s 1967 novel of the same name, the original film version of The Outsiders follows a gang of Greasers in rural Oklahoma. When Ponyboy (played by Thomas Howell) and Johnny (Ralph Macchio) start a fight that ends in the death of a member of a rival gang, the Socials, the Greasers go into hiding, where they are forced to reckon with the consequences of their violent actions.
The film was subsequently turned into a TV series which aired on Fox from March to July 1990. DiCaprio might look rather baby-faced in this audition tape, but he was actually around 16. According to cast member David Arquette, the young actor auditioned for the role of Ponyboy, which he can be seen reading here. Copolla probably thought he looked a little too young for the role but did end up offering him a small bit-part in the 90-minute pilot episode,
Directed by Sharron Miller, the pilot episode served as a sequel to the original film and open with a short scene of Dallas Winston – played by Matt Dillon in the film version – running from police and being shot dead. Alan Shapiro was charged with writing and directing this particular episode, which aired as a special preview on March 25th, 1990, seven years to the day after the film was released.
The show became the highest-rated drama in the history of the Fox network drawing in something like 14 million viewers. Leo may have lost out on the role, but his career hardly suffered as a result. After landing a role in Growing Pains in 1991, DiCaprio starred in the first instalment of the Poison Ivy franchise before winning the role of Johnny Depp’s mentally disabled younger brother in 1993’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? By the end of the decade, he was one of the most successful male stars in Hollywood,
