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Premiere magazine - November 1995: What's Eating Leonardo DiCaprio? part two
Leo has a strong sense of values. "If you're going to talk about money," he grins, "I'm the
cheapest bastard in the world. I mean, I never let people borrow money or anything. I'm still
making savings and stuff. I plan on investing it, just keeping it for when I'm older. You never know,
I may go bankrupt, or have a Hugh Grant situation. Then I'll have some dough."
He gazes round the opulent restaurant of the Hotel Principe." I haven't had time to let it sink in,"
he muses, of his newfound wealth. "I'm sort of saying now, OK, I can pay for this hotel for one
night if I want to stay. I don't have to leave right away."
Irmalin DiCaprio seperated from Leo's dad when she was still pregnant. The pair remained married and
close. But Leo grew up in a poor neighbourhood of Hollywood where his parents hat first decided to
settle, and got an early glimpse of how low life can really get.
"If you went there right now it would be filled with prostitutes and drug addicts on the streets,"
he says. "And it was sort of like that when I was younger. It was a bit of a shock. My mom took
great care of me, but I was able to see stuff at an early age, see the distinctions, and it's
like, yeah, OK, life is crap."
Later, Leo and his mom moved to a house in the Los Feliz area of LA where the actor stayed until
last year. Now he still rents an appartment in the same area as her. They are undeniably close.
Leo's next earliest memory after the tap-dancing episode with his dad is of being driven by his mom
through an outer district of LA.
"That's where you're going to be in two weeks," she told him, as they motored past his new
preschool. And he started to cry. "Am I going to stay all the way out here, all day?" he wailed.
"Noooo, I wanna stay home."
Leo has heard some pretty unlikely rumours about himself, but of them all, the one which hurt the
most concerned his mom. An interviewer for a national paper, who Leo likes to think he treated as a
friend, came to his house one day. He made notes about Leo's room, and Leo's mom gave him a guided
tour of the place. She even showed him to the garage to see some of Leo's trove of fan mail.
"Then we read the article," grimaces Leo. "and it says, 'Irmalin DiCaprio takes me into
the back, takes out a big fat joint, lights it up, takes two big hits and blows out as she walks
back into the livng room.' And, you know, it's not the principle of the pot, it's just the
principle of the lie. Marijuana's not that big of a deal, you know, I don't give a shit, but the
fact that some who I was nice to takes it into their head to invent something out of nothing,
and said those things about my mother pissed me off. She was so upset about it."
Leonardo wasn't the kind of kid who got into big trouble growing up, though he does recall
ripping off a bunch of bubble gum from a grocery store, and later on, at the age of nine, getting
stick at school for drawing a swastika on his forehead and imitating Charles Manson. He was always
up to something. When Leo was in elementary school, he won the respect of every pupil with his
Michael Jackson impression. One day, all the kids were breakdancing to 'Thriller', and Leo, the
only white kid there, was hanging in the background doing his super pop-blocking thing.
"The next thing I was like the most popular kid in school," he says. The coolest kid there walked up
and gave me a Street Beats tape and goes, 'Hey, this is for you.'"
At the end of the year there was an argument over the most beautiful girl in the school, and the
coolest kid threw Leo in a garbage can. But he still loves to listen 'Thriller'.
Leo was always performing this or that impression for his friends, but since he's become successful,
he's stopped doing it. Not completely, but he's more careful than he was. Sometimes he and his
friends make up coded languages, a bit like Jodie Foster's 'Nell'-speak, just to stop other people
from listening in. Like the "Is" language where you have to substitute "Is" somewhere in the word.
So "stupid" becomes "stuispid", or something.
I'm not really catching on, so Leo obliges me with a pretty nifty Michael Jackson impression instead,
kind of a two-hander to go with his Lisa Marie Presley imitation which is an almost word-for-word
recreation of their last interview on US TV.
Leo's dentist, the celebrity orthodontist Ewan Chandler, is the father of the boy who accused
Michael Jackson of molesting him. And Leo's doctor is the father of the celebrated Hollywood madam,
Heidi Fleiss.He understands intimately how what you do in private can bring you down in
public. "I want to be a jerk like the rest of my friends, and have fun, and not care about the
consequences," he laments. "But I just can't now."
*
There's a story doing the rounds of the Principe Hotel that Leo has been spotted rollerblading naked
down the hotel corridors at six in the morning and scaring the guests. It's not true, says Leo. It
was his friend. And he was wearing a pair of swimming trunks. But it's rather a nice image.
Leo strips off for his new film, 'Total Eclipe', a bit of a fleshfeast with some explicit, if artfully
shot, lovemaking between Leo's Rimbaud and David Thewlis' Verlaine. "I'm going to stick my tongue
down his fucking throat and probably swerve it around a bit," Leonardo boasted to one magazine
about his plans for their first screen kiss.
"I did clean off his lips, 'cause we were like eating food, but it didn't quite happen that way," he
now admits. "Actually I got very nauseous, as it was my first time kissing a guy. It was like slow
motion, you know what I mean? I saw his lips coming towards mine, and I was like, Oh Jesus, is this
really going to happen? Like, enough talking about it: my lips are going to touch
yours. It was weird too because I guess men have more body heat or something, but girls'
lips are cooler. His were like hot. Nasty. My stomach really was turning after that."
During the romantic encounter between the two actors, though no one else could see what was going
on, Leo was whispering in Thewlis' ear.
"He's twirling me round in his arms and I'm going, 'This sucks, this is sick, I want to throw up all
over you.'" And Thewlis? "I think he was fine with it. He kept on saying that if you're scared of it,
you're homophobic. Well, I'm sorry. Call me homophobic if you like, but I'm just grossed out by it."
Later on, during a wrestling scene, Leo got to keep his clothes while Thewlis had to disrobe.
"We had like six takes," recalls DiCaprio, with just a glimmer of revenge in his eyes, "and I think
every time, I hit him in the balls with my knee. I didn't mean to, but poor guy, he was really in
pain."
Leo isn't keen on going naked for the camera. "Exposing yourself, it's sort of personal," he smiles.
Then, sarcastically. "Oh no, I'm like a flower, and I can just go with my natural state. It's so
beautiful."
His decision to play the gay French poet will, of course, do little to diminish his reputation as
a risk-taker.
"I want to do some pretty crazy stuff," Leo told one interviewer. One of his favourite
performances is Jim Carrey's 'The Mask'.
"It's hard to explain, but I'm just sick of like the heroic man figure that thinks they're perfect,"
he says. "I just like the idea of doing more unplanned stuff."
He turned down the role of Robin in 'Batman Forever' because it was too mundane. "I couldn't deal with
playing a character who rides motorcycles and has a leather jacket and is a tough kid, you know?
There's the stamp of stereotypical right there." He guffaws. "It's like, can you think of anything
more obvious?"
But even now, with an Oscar nomination for 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape' and a string of films to
prove he's got the talent of an actor twice his age, Leo admits he still doesn't quite wield the
power to make and break the really big movie deals. Even if he wanted to.
"I just don't want to be big box-office yet," he says. "The more you stay low-key at a young age,
the more you have room for that stuff in the future, and as long as I can maintain doing films that
I want to do, then I'd rather not blow my load on the work. It seems to me that a lot of people who
try to do that just disappear."
"Before I started I had this view that I was only going to do one film a year, and that it was only
going to be a really fantastic film," he continues." I still think that I want to limit myself to not
working all the time, 'cause that's not good for me and not good for my career, but mainly I'm just
trying to be selective and to cut through the bullshit hype about scripts, and what everyone else is
telling me to do. It's a really hard thing to learn, and I haven't mastered it yet, but I just
want to keep on doing stuff that hasn't been done before."
*
In this month's 'The Basketball Diaries' Leonardo recreates the persona of junkie poet Jim Carroll,
on whose book the film is based, when Carroll was still young enough to be turning tricks for drugs
money. It doesn't matter that Leo hates the very idea of narcotics. It was the idea of Carroll
which appealed to him.
"The book was so hardcore," he enthuses, "and I loved the detail, how this guy made up his own
world. That's the kind of stuff I've been doing a lot, you know, like Arthur Rimbaud. I
like young guys who've really been in history, who've done really different stuff. Just to
try to deal with this fellow who lived evrything at once, you know, was so cool."
Though the early drug-infused scenes in 'The Basketball Diaries' didn't phase Leo, a later set-up,
where he has to deliver a long monologue to an audience did. It also highlighted the pressures
which early stardom can bring.
"I can't focus on doing really long speeches," Leo explains. Looking out to an audience and trying
to act at the same time, I sort of got dyxlexic. And Lorraine Bracco [his co-star in the film] was
like, 'It's all right, calm down, it's not that big a deal, do it tomorrow if you can't do it today.'
And it's a tough thing - you get in a situation where you feel that you have to be perfect all
the time and it sucks, it really does. Sometimes you just sit there and go, 'Jesus Christ, I don't
know what to do.'"
*
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