Leonardo DiCaprio walks into a Hollywood bar and asks, “What does it take to get an Oscar around here?”
Every. Single. Year.
In what appears to be a prolonged practical joke, Leo, now 40, is still hunting his first Academy Award. And hunt he shall, as he plays a bloodthirsty 19th-century frontiersman pillaging the blustery American wilderness (though filmed in Canada!) in The Revenant, which hits theatres this Christmas.
If you haven’t seen the trailer yet, it looks pretty damn Oscar-worthy…until we remember that this is an annually disproven sentiment regarding any work with DiCaprio’s name attached to it.
He really did go buck wild for this role, though.
Director Alejandro González Iñárritu, of Birdman and Babel fame, the latter of which won him an Oscar, said filming The Revenant was a “living hell,” which sounds mild compared to what it must have been like to act in the film. Leo says he flirted with hypothermia consistently, slept inside animal corpses (!), and ate raw bison liver on a regular basis, none of which he regrets.
“The truth is that I knew what I was getting into,” he says. “This was a film that had been floating around for quite some time, but nobody was crazy enough to really take this on.”
If Academy Awards were based on degree of suffering, it’s probably safe to say we have a winner. Michael Caine (Youth), Matt Damon (The Martian), Will Smith (Concussion), Eddie Redmayne (The Danish Girl), Johnny Depp (Black Mass), and Michael Fassbender (Steve Jobs) seem to be the other noteworthy contenders for Best Actor so far.
Only 128 days left in Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2015 Oscar campaign.
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