DiCaprio.
By Ingrid Sischy. Interview June 1994.
Many famous actors go their entire careers watching the annual Academy Award ceremonies from the cheap seats - where you sit when you're not a nominee. Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, John Barrymore, Mia Farrow and Edward G. Robinson, to name a few. Then there are those like Leonardo DiCaprio, this year's dark horse in the best supporting actor race, nominated for only his second big-screen role to date - his showy, affecting turn as Johnny's Depp's mentally disabled younger brother in the small-town drama What's Eating Gilbert Grape. But when you're 19, everything is no big deal. Including an Oscar nomination. "I wasn't waiting by the television or anything like that," he says of the morning the nominations were announced. "I was asleep in bed and I got the phone call, and I was like `OK, cool, I want to go back to sleep.' Then my agent, my lawyer, my publicist, my parents, my mom, my grandma, my aunts, my uncles, they're all calling me. I'm like `Look, I know. I know! IT'S GREAT! OH, I'M EXCITED! "As far as winning is concerned, I've heard you shouldn't win now anyways, because if you win now, your career will be over. You'll never work again because the heat will be so big, you'll crash and burn. But if you just get the nomination, it'll stay. People will want more. I just go, 'OK, whatever,'" he says. And so Leonardo DiCaprio shrugs away what Hollywood considers the ultimate verification of success. Or does he? Behind impish eyes and mocking smile, there's a sunny intelligence at work. Is he being honest or merely facetious? Who knows. His demeanor is playful ("I have to go to the bathroom after this, by the way; just letting you know," he says suddenly). He seems like he's going to fidget his way right out of his flannel shirt, Yankees cap and torn-knee jeans. His gangly feet sprawl on the couch of his Regency Hotel suite; his arms flail; his cap comes on and off; he slurps coffee from a spoon. You get the sense that he'd rather be on a basketball court somewhere. Get past the cool cynicism in his answers, though, and you realize DiCaprio is...struggling. He is a relatively innocent newcomer blindsided by sudden, unexpected stardom. "Yeah, there is a certain amount of heat", he says. "I'm not exactly sure how the heat thing operates. I think it's the more you say no, the more they want you. Or the more mysterious you are, the more they want you. But I haven't gotten a 20-picture deal at Warner Bros. yet." The heat has affected his Saturday nights, too ? though he's trying hard to live like he used to. "I'd say a lot more girls look at me now. I usually just smile and say thank you. But I still have the same friends. I've just met a lot more people than I had before, and people actually want to hear some things that I have to say now, rather than just being part of the crowd. Whether that's there or not, it doesn't matter. I like to act." DiCaprio, born in Los Angeles, began acting at 14 with a series of commercials and educational films. It all arose from "wanting to get attention, which turned into trying to do creative things." Where he lived didn't hurt. "In that town, if you have a semi-good looking face, everyone's always saying, 'Hey, you'd be good for acting. You have a good face for a commercial. You can do Rice Krispies or something,'" His first break was landing a recurring role on ABC's Growing Pains, during that show's last season in 1992. But movie auditions were a string of failures. "Thank God I didn't get them. I came really close to a lot of terrible movies. I just think about the fact that, hey, I could've done Ladybugs. That was a big audition. I was so depressed that I didn't get." And was better off without. He finally landed a spot in This Boy's Life, the 1993 drama based on Tobias Wolff's memoirs, playing the terrified stepson of an abusive boor, performed with typical ferocity by Robert De Niro. "I don't know how I got it. I really don't." His theory: his lack of experience worked in his favor. "Everyone else was trying to match De Niro," he says. "I hadn't seen Raging Bull or many of his movies, because I was never a big movie watcher. I knew he was a great actor, but I hardly knew what acting was." Instead, DiCaprio did what came naturally. During his reading at the audition, he leapt to his feet and ended his speech by waving an angry, quivering finger an inch from De Niro's befuddled face. "I wanted to make him remember me, to give him something," DiCaprio laughs. "And De Niro sat there, laughing and saying, 'Who is this kid? What is this kid doing? What are you doing?' And I was like 'Oh, it's just a joke. Just messing around.'" But something clicked. DiCaprio got the part and played it measured and quiet, deftly balancing the ranting, drooling De Niro. "I was afraid he would beat me up off camera," DiCaprio laughs. "No...he was a normal, funny guy. He would joke around a lot, trying to make us laugh, because the movie was so heavy. Just watching him get into character, man, was amazing. He has a bundle of resources to pull things from." DiCaprio learned much from De Niro about preparation for his role as the endearingly loopy Arnie in What's Eating Gilbert Grape. He met with mentally disabled children, taking note of their attributes and physical expressions, then practiced for hours in front of a mirror. Director Lasse Hallstrom encouraged him to go off on his own riffs. " Lasse liked for me to improvise and talk about ridiculous things. He wanted me to constantly be on a high. 'Do more, go crazy, do this, do that,'" he says. The result is uncannily convincing -- you never once see DiCaprio "acting" in the same way you could see Dustin Hoffman working it in Rain Man. "I had such a wide range of stuff to do. In the most dramatic of scenes, I could be thinking about a chocolate chip cookie and scream that out, because that's how irrelevant whatever he was thinking was. He's not in the moment. He'd be like "hot fudge sundae!" while everyone was screaming at each other. I guess that's what I created for myself, to make him that character, this sort of free spirit." Since Grape, DiCaprio has completed Sam Raimi's western The Quick and the Dead, co-starring Sharon Stone and Gene Heckman. He's currently filming The Basketball Diaries, a gritty low-budget drama about "a sort of beatnik buy who got addicted to heroin when he was young and lived in the streets of New York as a hood and a thief." After that, he has a shot at starring in the big-budget biopic of James Dean, though he's "not supposed to comment" on the negotiations. He also hopes to move out on his own within the next year (he lives with his mother). But first there are the Oscars. Monday night, DiCaprio will be in the good seats, eager to accept if he wins, eager to move on if he doesn't. Eager? Yes, the cynical tone is wearing off and enthusiasm is poking through, if only temporarily. "It took a while, because I'm new to this business," he says of the realization that he is up for the highest acting honor Hollywood has to give." But finally it all sort of set in, what the whole deal is. It's great. It's so cool." |