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Leonardo DiCaprio has been the face of eternal youth for so long that it’s still a jolt to register he turned 50 last year. But as he walked the carpet in Hollywood on Monday night, the actor admitted he’s entering a new phase - on screen and, perhaps, off it too.
“I’m slowing down a bit,” he told People at the world premiere of One Battle After Another, his latest collaboration with director Paul Thomas Anderson. “But when these opportunities come up… I can’t say no.”
The film, out later this month, sees DiCaprio play Bob Ferguson, a former political revolutionary pursued by a ruthless military leader (played by Sean Penn).
It is his first project since Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023, and a very different role: part fugitive thriller, part meditation on loyalty, family and the legacies of old battles.
It is, in other words, a film about reckoning with the past, not unlike the mood DiCaprio himself seems to be in.
“Awards can come and go, box office can come and go,” he reflected at the premiere. “But the pieces of art you still talk about, the ones that last... those are the films we strive for.”
If the professional pivot is clear, friends say the personal one is quietly unfolding too. Sources told the Standard that DiCaprio’s relationship with Italian model Vittoria Ceretti, 27, is the most serious he’s had in years.
“She’s met all his important friends, she’s been there at the big moments, and yes, they’ve talked about a family,” one insider tells Standard. “For someone who was famously committed to bachelorhood, it’s not something he’s dismissing anymore.”
Ceretti was a discreet presence at the premiere, gliding through the TCL Chinese Theatre crowd in a white gown at this week’s premiere making sure to avoid her Hollywood beau. She did not pose alongside DiCaprio, but her attendance was no accident.
Earlier this year, she accompanied him to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s wedding in Venice, and in May they attended the Met Gala together.
In April, she told Vogue France that being defined as “girlfriend of” could be frustrating, but insisted: “If you know you love each other, then there’s no reason to be alarmed. Love protects and gives confidence.”
For DiCaprio, the shift feels linked to his milestone birthday. In a recent Esquire profile, he admitted that while he still feels 32 emotionally, turning 50 created “a desire to be more honest and not waste your time.”
He credited his mother, Irmelin, with showing him how to strip life back to essentials: “She just says exactly what she thinks and wastes no time.”
The man who built his image on yachts, awards and never being tied down seems, at last, ready to consider a different script.
One Battle After Another opens September 26.
