The world wants and needs Leonardo DiCaprio lookalikes; it craves them, requires them. Good, then, that two have now turned up: first, 21-year-old Swedish Instagram model Konrad Annerud – who properly, properly looks like young Leo, angel Leo, Titanic Leo – and then 33-year-old Russian technical support manager Roman Burtsaev, who looks like a man with a goatee and a squint.
Listen: they scratch wildly different DiCaprio-alike itches. Konrad, with his perfect cherub chin and swept side-parting and angelic nose, is a callback to the 90s Leo of old, for those who miss pre-beefy Leo, the Leo they fell for in Romeo + Juliet, before he started climbing inside horses in desperate want of an Oscar; Roman is sort of what Leonardo DiCaprio would look like if he went a bit Brando-towards-the-end.
That doesn’t stop them both being raised to the same pantheon, though: while Annerud works as a model and has reportedly signed a record contract, Roman has recently been given his own reality TV show, Romance With DiCaprio, where producers attempt to turn him into a viable DiCaprio alternative, wrestling with men in bear costumes for exceptionally strange skits, posing in tuxedos with out-of-proportion Oscar statuettes.
Anyway, men who look like DiCaprio do pretty well for themselves, in the end. Maybe that’s something that can spur DiCaprio 1.0 on as he makes a bid for Oscar glory this week: instead of looking to a yacht full of supermodels for motivation, he can turn and look into the narrow, not-very-much-like-his eyes of Roman Burtsaev, and think: “If he can succeed, with about 20% of the same face as me, then so can I.”
