“We can make this work”: when ‘Pokémon’ refused to cast Leonardo DiCaprio
As the single highest-grossing media franchise of all time with lifetime earnings of over $150 billion, Pokémon obviously doesn’t need big names to make money. It could have had one, though, until one producer decided that he wasn’t interested in courting a post-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio.
Once James Cameron’s historical romance had set sail toward shattering almost every box office record imaginable, everybody wanted a piece of its leading man. Except for the people tasked with bringing Pokémon to an American audience, it would seem, which is bizarre when there was a decent amount of confidence that they could get him.
After Pokémon: The First Movie had made a killing in Japanese cinemas in the summer of 1998, plans were afoot to re-record the film with an English-language cast and release it in the United States. That didn’t happen until November 1999, and in between those two points, producer Norman Grossfeld made it clear that ‘Leomania’ wasn’t a craze he was interested in capitalising on, despite being given the hard-sell.
“He said, ‘Hey, we really want this,'” he recalled being told by a studio representative. “We can make this work. We’re going to bring in Leonardo DiCaprio to play the voice of Ash. It’s going to get a lot of buzz, we’re going to have a lot, and we’ll get all these celebrities. It’s going to be really big.” Still, he wouldn’t be moved.
“Whether he could have been enticed to play Ash in this movie is unclear, but either way, it wouldn’t have mattered because Norman says he said no to DiCaprio in that meeting,” Alex Pappademas explained on The Big Hit Show podcast. “Because, as Norman saw it, having somebody else do the voice would have been weird for the kids who’d grown so accustomed to Ash sounding the way he did in the show.”
For American audiences, Ash sounded like Veronica Taylor, who voiced the role in the English-language dub of the Japanese TV series. When she discovered that DiCaprio could have stolen it away from her, she could barely believe her ears. “I have never heard that before,” she told Vulture. “That can’t possibly be true.”
Grossfeld confirmed that it was, and Taylor thought she was the better choice anyway. “Nothing against Leonardo DiCaprio, but having already played Ash for a year, I was better suited to fill the sneakers than he would have been jumping in,” she declared. A valid point, but of all the people to have turned down the opportunity to try and cast DiCaprio in anything, the producer of a Pokémon movie takes the cake.
The brand was big enough that it didn’t need him, and there are no guarantees he would have even entertained the notion. It’s been almost 30 years since the film was released, and the Academy Award winner still hasn’t lent his voice to an animated feature, and the closest he got was when he was announced to voice Jack Frost in Rise of the Guardians, before he dropped out and was replaced by Chris Pine.
