14 DAY TRIAL // Starring in this summer’s hottest movie, Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” has forced Leonardo DiCaprio, who usually keeps everything about his personal life off the first pages of the tabs, to come out of “hiding” and do one of the things he probably hates the most, namely talk about himself. Fans must surely be psyched about it, especially since the current Rolling Stone feature on Leo is one of the most stunning, honest portraits ever done of the actor.
Not long ago, DiCaprio promised that he would never complain about being famous because, at the end of the day, he would always have the choice to retire from acting if he didn’t like the attention he was getting from the media. The RS interview is not about to become an exception of that: if anything, the actor almost seems happy to have grown up in an age when paparazzi agencies and celebrity blogs were not that many – and certainly not as merciless towards stars as they are today. This way, he got to have his cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.
“I got to be wild and nuts, and I didn’t suffer as much as people do now, where they have to play it so safe that they ruin their credibility. I didn’t care what anyone thought… It was also about avoiding the tornado of chaos, of potential downfall. It was, ‘Wow, how lucky are we to not have hung out with that crowd or done those things?’ My two main competitors in the beginning, the blond-haired kids I went to audition with, one hung himself and the other died of a heroin overdose… I was never into drugs at all. There aren’t stories of me in a pool of my own vomit in a hotel room on the Hollywood Strip,” the actor says.
This also allowed him to be himself without living in fear that an entire world may hold him responsible for something he did or said without thinking it through. Asked to describe himself as a child, DiCaprio says he was quite a “punk” kid because he didn’t know when not to shoot his mouth off. Another thing that he liked about his youth was his relationship to women before the “Titanic” fame, Leo reveals in the same interview. After the Cameron film came out and DiCaprio became an international teen idol, he lost all certainty women were going out of him because of who he was, as opposed to what he did for a living.
“I had better success meeting girls before Titanic. My interactions with them didn’t have all the stigma behind it, not to mention there wasn’t a perception of her talking to me for only one reason. It was like there was a separate entity out there. Not to use a James Cameron reference, but it was like being in a little bit of an avatar. (cringes) That’s going to sound extremely self-indulgent. It’s going to sound like, ‘Oh, I was a frickin’ avatar,’ give me a break, I’m already vomiting,” the actor says.
For the full interview with Rolling Stone, pick up the latest issue, now on newsstands, or see here.
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