Leonardo DiCaprio has revealed he could have had a stage name after an agent told him he needed to change his name early in his career – because it was "too ethnic."
"I finally got an agent [and] they said, 'Your name is too ethnic,'" DiCaprio said during an appearance on the New Heights podcast.
"I go, 'What do you mean, it’s Leonardo DiCaprio?' They go, 'No, too ethnic. They’re never going to hire you… Your new name is Lenny Williams,'" he continued. "I was 12, 13, I said, 'What’s Lenny Williams?'… 'Well, we took your middle name [Wilhelm] and we made it your [last name]. Now you're Lenny.'"
The actor's father reportedly put a stop to the proposed name change, though. "He said, 'Over my dead body.'"
Of course, DiCaprio's name didn't stop his rise to fame: after several small-screen roles as a teenager he landed parts in movies like What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Romeo + Juliet, and Titanic in the '90s.
Next up for DiCaprio is action thriller One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and based on the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, in which he plays an ex-revolutionary who's dragged back into the fray to rescue his daughter from a corrupt military official. The cast also includes Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, and Sean Penn.
One Battle After Another arrives in theaters on September 26. In the meantime, fill out your watchlist with our guide to the rest of this year's biggest movie release dates.
