Leonardo DiCaprio's strategy: how he managed to cover his scandals with boredom and ecology
Tarantino's latest film has just been released, he is one of the highest paid actors in the world and causes fascination even though his interviews are bland. What's his trick to maintaining his enigma status?
In 1998 Leonardo DiCaprio (Los Angeles, 1974) was the king of the world. While deciding among the hundreds of scripts proposed to him after Titanic, he had daily revelries with his colleagues at Victoria's Secret parties where they sneaked in uninvited, dumped junk from a bridge into freeway cars and closed strip clubs without leave a tip. They called themselves the Pussy Posse (the pussy gang) and people like Donald Trump, Susan Sarandon or Mariah Carey lined up to greet them in their booth.
Today, Leonardo DiCaprio is the most famous actor on the planet and nobody knows anything about him. He only dates models: eight in two decades, never older than 25, the last one - actress Camila Morrone - is 21. He emptied the VIP area of a Miami club taking the 20 girls to his mansion and held a party at his Ibiza yacht for Tobey Maguire, her recently divorced Pussy Posse partner, packed with models.
However, his public image is that of an artist of integrity, discreet and committed to the environment. His environmental activism has helped him to distract attention from his private life, which continues to be a perpetual adolescent binge, in a strategy that he already explained in 2000. “I pretend that I am a complex enigma but the truth is that I don't want anyone to know who I am. I want to look as dry, gray and boring as possible, ”he said before listing 20 endangered species.
That 1998 changed his life on three levels: Leomania, a collective obsession of the public that placed 10 books about him in the Top 15 of the best sellers in the United States; partying with the Pussy Posse, and a meeting with Al Gore to learn about the threat of climate change. His idol Marlon Brando despised him (“He looks like a girl”), Senator John McCain also (“He's a puny sissy”) and he countered them: “Just because he wants to party with other guys doesn't mean he's gay! ”.
James Cameron, director of Titanic, described him as "a spoiled pimp" after the actor explained why he was not going to attend the Oscars with an SMS that said "it's not my thing, trunk." The joke “From Titanic they have nominated everything but DiCaprio and the iceberg” was the first Leonardo DiCaprio meme on the Internet. Many more would arrive, the result of an obsession of the public to decipher the happy mystery. Who the hell is Leonardo DiCaprio? If he refuses to show his true personality, the Internet seems determined to build it for him: his promiscuity is perceived as a sympathetic and harmless extravagance, his silence as decency, and his professional discipline as desperation to win an Oscar. But he never gives any acknowledgment of receipt to the narratives that are formed around him.
When Lady Gaga's hip collided with DiCaprio's elbow on her walk to the Golden Globes stage, the GIF went viral within minutes. "I just didn't know what was going to happen there," he just clarified. When the jocular rumor broke out that the bear from The Revenant had tried to abuse him, his publicist denied it with a statement: "That is not what happened." When asked why he turned down the roles of Robin in Batman Forever, Anakin in Attack of the Clones and Peter Parker in Spiderman, he merely confirmed that "there were meetings, but I didn't do them at the end." In this way, the actor forces the public to speculate on the real reasons why he declined to star in those blockbusters: he is the highest grossing actor who has ever shot a sequel, the only star who has not made superhero films and his only smash hit - Apart from Titanic- (Origin) it was an opulent psychotherapy session. DiCaprio seems hell-bent on proving that Titanic was an exception in his career, which has thrived not because of Titanic but in spite of it.
Two weeks ago, during the promotion of the film Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood (in theaters since August 15), you were asked about the popular theory that Jack - a character who played in Titanic and who died drowned - fit in the table next to Rose. While his co-stars, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, joked (DiCaprio barely grants solo interviews, since 1998 he has lent himself only five in-depth reports), he replied "no comment" by looking at the ground. DiCaprio resists being the viral meme of the week and takes himself so seriously ("And bring a human being into a world like this?" He responds when asked if he wants to be a father) that the public is done respecting it. Every movie buff has a different movie in which he realized that DiCaprio is one of the best actors of his generation.
In reality, his postTitanic career has only continued the restlessness of his beginnings (abused adolescent in This Boy's Life, mentally disabled in Who Does Gilbert Grape Love ?, drug addict in Diary of a rebel) with cornered, stubborn or mentally ill characters. The project chosen among those hundreds of offers in 1998, La playa, scared off the teenagers who paid the entrance looking for an adventure in turquoise tones and they ran into a descent into madness through existentialist talks. DiCaprio, for his part, took all of his colleagues on vacation to Thailand while filming at the expense of the film's budget.
"His face of him is a battlefield of moral conflict," admires Martin Scorsese. "I like that he doesn't get into two movies a year," Quentin Tarantino applauds, "like Pacino or De Niro in the seventies, he does only what he wants, so if he chooses a movie, the audience knows it will be a good one." Thanks to him, projects impossible to sell in multiplex cinemas such as The Wolf of Wall Street or The Revenant obtained financing and swept the box office by facing the typical blockbusters: DiCaprio is the last survivor of that line of stars who took people to the movies . That is why his Oscar is the only Oscar that has mattered to the general public in the last 20 years.
“In person he is polite, charming, joking and looks you in the eye. And he manages not to give you a single clue of his true personality, "lamented a journalist from The Guardian in 2007 after interviewing him for five hours. “At the end, Leo went off to run a nine-hour spree in which he spent 10,000 euros. And he is irritating because that DiCaprio is much more entertaining than the one who drank sparkling water with me for five hours. " He does not hide his strategy to maintain control in interviews: "I only speak about what I want to talk about, no matter what the question is." In 2016, during the most intense promotion of his career for the Oscar that he would end up winning for The Revenant, they asked him about the Leomania era. "The what?", He replied, pretending not to know the name that the press gave to the phenomenon of its global fame.
Leonardo DiCaprio has used that fame to raise awareness in society of the urgency to act as soon as possible to mitigate climate change. He has met with Barack Obama, with Pope Francis and with Vladimir Putin (who assured that Leo is "a real man"), has served as a spokesman for the United Nations and has produced seven documentaries. But his concern, while genuine, has also served her well to defuse questions she doesn't feel like answering. Among them, anyone related to Don's Plum, the amateur film that he shot with the Pussy Posse in the mid-nineties in which DiCaprio improvised phrases such as "stop looking at me like that or I'll throw a bottle in your fucking face, you fucking bitch" before a girl with tears in her eyes. DiCaprio and Maguire used their contacts to block their premiere after they became famous. However, the film is now available on YouTube thanks to his director, who, after being expelled from the Pussy Posse, decided to publish it.
Meanwhile the stories of the other DiCaprio, the party animal, continue to creep through the cracks of his demure public image. After winning the Oscar he went out for drinks with the Pussy Posse howling and yelling "pack of wolves!" nonstop (the actor denies ever wearing the Pussy Posse label, which he considers "degrading to women"). One model said that she slept with him, that he is a bum in bed and that she did not stop vaping and listening to music on her headphones during the powder. And, on a TV show, Jennifer Lopez texted him ("I want to let my hair down, any suggestions?") And he replied, "Do you want to party tonight, bubu?"
At the 2014 Golden Globes, Tina Fey introduced her by saying, "And now, as if we were the vagina of a top model, let's give a warm welcome to Leonardo DiCaprio." He came out on stage and handed out his award without flinching. "I always ask my friends to imitate me and they are never capable," he lamented at the time. “That makes me feel very uninteresting. My friends consider me insipid. " A tasteless man who collects dinosaur skulls, one of which he sold to Russell Crowe for 30,000 euros during a binge.
This prudent strategy has protected him to such an extent that, in 2016, the internet turned into a clamor for poor Leonardo DiCaprio to be awarded the Oscar once and for all. The narrative that he was wanting to win it (only based on the fact that he chooses lucid roles, because he of course always responded with an innocuous "it would be an honor to win it, but it does not depend on me") led the public to feel sorry for him every time. lost. That's how it is. Too bad for a guy who has worked with the best directors in Hollywood, who charges a minimum of 20 million euros for each arthouse film he shoots and who, during that party on his yacht in Ibiza, bragged about attending castings on the teenage channel CW to hook up with aspiring actresses in their 20s. Perhaps getting perceived as a boring, formal and even bland man is the best career interpretation of him. And his crusade for the environment, as noble as it is convenient, makes more sense for him than for anyone else: this planet is his, it is normal for him to want to protect it.
