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Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Leonardo DiCaprio Reveals His Biggest Career 'Regret' Is Turning Down This Mark Wahlberg Movie: 'A Masterpiece'
"It was a profound movie of my generation," the actor saidNEED TO KNOW Leonardo DiCaprio admitted his "regret" over turning down Mark Wahlberg's role in Boogie Nights in a new interview with Paul Thomas Anderson for Esquire "It was a profound movie of my generation," he said, calling the film "a masterpiece" DiCaprio's Basketball Diaries costar Wahlberg went on to land the part of Eddie Adams/Dirk Diggler, and DiCaprio said he "can't imagine anyone [else]" nowLeonardo DiCaprio "can't imagine anyone but" Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights, but he still regrets not starring in the classic film. Wahlberg, 54, famously played Eddie Adams/Dirk Diggler in the 1997 Paul Thomas Anderson film, but the part was originally offered to DiCaprio, 50, who turned it down as he had already signed on to star in James Cameron's epic Titanic. But in a new interview with Anderson for Esquire's Mavericks of Hollywood issue ahead of the release of their movie One Battle After Another, DiCaprio told the director, 55, "I'll say it even though you're here: My biggest regret is not doing Boogie Nights." "It was a profound movie of my generation," he continued. "I can't imagine anyone but Mark in it. When I finally got to see that movie, I just thought it was a masterpiece. It's ironic that you're the person asking that question, but it's true." Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human-interest stories. Boogie Nights takes place in the 1970s and follows Wahlberg's Eddie, a teenage nightclub dishwasher, after he is discovered by filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) and becomes a wildly successful porn star named Dirk Diggler. The movie also starred Julianne Moore, Heather Graham, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy and Philip Seymour Hoffman. As for Wahlberg and DiCaprio, the two worked together both before and after Boogie Nights: in The Basketball Diaries (1995) and The Departed (2006). Wahlberg opened up about the pair's rocky start before filming The Basketball Diaries in a 2018 interview with Extra, admitting they "both had a specific opinion about each other" initially. 'Once I finally got to the point where I was able to audition and read with [DiCaprio], then we just both kinda looked at each other, we were like, 'Wow!' We were literally out that night and we became fast friends," he added. DiCaprio and Anderson finally get to team up with One Battle After Another, which stars the Oscar winner as Bob Ferguson, a former revolutionary figure who is being hunted by Sean Penn's police character, Steven Lockjaw. Written and directed by Anderson, the action-thriller also stars Teyana Taylor, Wood Harris, Alana Haim, Regina Hall, Benicio del Toro and Chase Infiniti. Related: In his chat with Anderson for Esquire, DiCaprio addressed how One Battle After Another "has been on" the director's "desk for a long time," adding, "It was a personal story for you in a lot of ways and certainly pertinent to the world that we're living in right now." "But ultimately, wanting to do this movie was pretty simple: I've been wanting to work with you — Paul — for something like 20 years now," DiCaprio continued, "and I loved this idea of the washed-up revolutionary trying to erase his past and disappear and try and live some sort of normal life raising his daughter. One Battle After Another is in theaters Sept. 26. Read the original article on People
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The Independent
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
The Basketball Diaries at 30: How Leonardo DiCaprio started – and abandoned – his ‘bad boy' era
Leonardo DiCaprio may have been born in 1974, but he was made in the 1990s. Over the course of just a few years, DiCaprio went from total unknown to household name. Everyone remembers the Oscar-nominated turn as a learning-disabled child in What's Eating Gilbert Grape; his role as Claire Danes's star-cross'd paramour in the whizzy, revisionist Romeo + Juliet; and, of course, Titanic, that unsinkable behemoth of a romantic blockbuster. Fewer people, however, are likely to remember The Basketball Diaries, released 30 years ago today. But that film endures as a curious detour for the actor – the apex of DiCaprio's hurriedly aborted 'bad boy' era. For much of the first half of The Basketball Diaries, DiCaprio's insouciant athlete is almost a caricature of a teenage rebel: he fights; he smokes; he steals; he smoulders. An early scene sees him hunched over at the front of a classroom, receiving a robust rear-end paddling from a starchy Catholic schoolmaster. The bell rings. 'Too bad, Father,' DiCaprio's character smirks. 'I was just starting to enjoy myself.' He and his delinquent cronies (James Madio, Patrick McGaw, and a just-out-of-Funky-Bunch Mark Wahlberg) then skive off school for the day; we watch as DiCaprio perches on the back of a moving bus, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The film veers into darker territory, as DiCaprio's character becomes addicted to heroin and lives on the streets. It's all in all something of a mixed bag: unevenly paced, self-consciously edgy, and lacquered with histrionic cliché. Put this together with the film's meagre commercial performance and it's unsurprising that The Basketball Diaries islittle more than a footnote in the scheme of DiCaprio's career. (It may in fact be best known for a dream sequence depicting a school shooting, which later prompted lawsuits in the wake of two real-life shootings.) But it's noteworthy just how rare it was to see DiCaprio explore a character this smarmy and obnoxious. Not too long after The Basketball Diaries was released, DiCaprio signed on to Woody Allen's Celebrity – another instance of his apple-cheeked persona breaking bad. (Back in the 1990s, Allen films were of course a hugely attractive proposition for any actor, not fraught with ignominy as they are today.) The glossy black-and-white comedy cast Kenneth Branagh as an archetypical Allen nebbish, and DiCaprio, in a supporting role, as a bratty and mercurial A-lister. By that point, DiCaprio and his social circle (a group of young, mostly male celebs including Tobey Maguire, future Entourage star Kevin Connolly, and the magician David Blaine) were the subject of significant tabloid attention. Celebrity 's metatextual overtones were hard to miss – hot young superstar DiCaprio playing hot young superstar Brandon Darrow – even if the extremity of the character's hotel-room-trashing behaviour was a fabrication of the film. The late 1990s also saw a protracted dispute over Don's Plum, a bizarre and unpleasant indie film starring DiCaprio, Maguire, and other members of their friend group (who styled themselves, if tabloid reports were to be believed, as the 'p***y posse'). It's perhaps the grimmest iteration of DiCaprio's edgelord phase; one moment sees DiCaprio's character yell at Amber Benson that he will 'f***ing throw a bottle' at her face, calling her a 'goddamn wh***.' The film was panned by critics, but its release was infamously blocked, with its actors claiming to have participated in the understanding that they were making a short film, not a feature. There would be other roles for DiCaprio that loosely fit the 'bad boy' remit – his thrill-seeking globetrotter in The Beach had elements of this, certainly – but it never played to his strengths. (He was nearly cast as the lead in the 2000 adaptation of American Psycho – a prospect that would have really put his capacity for nastiness through its paces.) In the Nineties, he was defined by a sort of boyish, approachable-but-not-too-earthy confidence; it's what makes his Romeo, and the plucky Jack in Titanic, such winning romantic leads. He seems too much the pretty boy to be a natural fit for malignity, and it's no surprise that the 2000s saw him largely pivot back to more likeable leading-man roles. From the very offset, DiCaprio has never really been an actor with a rigid persona. It's significant that his breakthrough – playing the learning-disabled Arnie in What's Eating Gilbert Grape – was a distinct, mannered performance, more befitting a 'character actor' than a movie star. As the 1990s progressed, and he became a little more consistent in his choices, his forays into antiheroism can perhaps be seen as an effort to resist Hollywood's natural pigeonholing. Later in his career, he would branch out into scumbaggery with greater success, in projects such as Django Unchained and The Wolf of Wall Street. Here's a coincidence for you: The Basketball Diaries is in fact one of two entirely separate projects in which DiCaprio is spanked with a paddle. The second is 2023's Killers of the Flower Moon, wherein DiCaprio's character – a spineless, selfish and dimwitted poisoner – is given a paddlin' by his uncle (Robert DeNiro) in a masonic ritual. The difference between these two scenes is actually rather illuminating. In The Basketball Diaries, we watch DiCaprio's character bear the punishment with a kind of defiant cheek we are supposed to find charming. In Killers of the Flower Moon, it's a silly and embarrassing spectacle for all involved. Watch DiCaprio in any recent film, and it's noteworthy just how uninterested he is in preserving his own dignity. It's a shamelessness that he hadn't yet mastered back in the days of The Basketball Diaries, or even Celebrity. In something like The Basketball Diaries, we see the seeds of the performer that DiCaprio would one day become. He just had to wait a couple of decades for those seeds to sprout.
