They say no man is an island – even if, like Leonardo DiCaprio, they own their own private one. But is that really true? There has always been something remote about the 51-year-old star of Titanic and One Battle After Another. It’s a mystique that Golden Globes host Nikki Glaser touched on at last weekend’s awards ceremony, after cracking wise about DiCaprio’s age-gap dating history. “I’m sorry I made that joke,” she said. “It’s cheap. I tried not to, but like... we don’t know anything else about you, man. There’s nothing else. Like open up. I’m serious. I looked. I searched. The most in-depth interview you’ve ever given was in Teen Beat magazine in 1991. Is your favourite food still pasta, pasta, and more pasta?”
She’s not wrong: even by movie-star standards, DiCaprio remains more or less a complete cipher off-screen. We know he supports the LA Lakers. We know he likes the environment. (His private Caribbean island, Blackadore Caye, is said to house something called a luxury “eco-resort”.) But what else? Does he have a sense of humour? Does he have a Netflix account? Does he doomscroll into the wee hours? Beyond his aforementioned dating history (about which only the vaguest details ever really surface), the only solid narratives around DiCaprio are professional ones. For years, he was defined by his fruitless – even, as popular logic had it, desperate – pursuit of an Academy Award: the decades-long snubbing became a meme in and of itself. After missing out on the prize for films such as What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993), The Aviator (2004) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), DiCaprio finally exorcised that demon with 2015’s The Revenant, now best remembered as the film in which an incessantly gurning Leo gets mauled by a bear and eats raw bison liver.
The bizarre intensity of DiCaprio’s process there – the madness to his Method, as it were – seemed to play into all the actorly preconceptions about him, the idea of him as an obliviously self-serious thesp. It is this reputation that might explain the virality of the Golden Globes’ big social media moment: a candid clip in which Leo, seated, can be seen flamboyantly gesticulating to another award-goer (speculated, by online sleuths, to be One Battle co-star Teyana Taylor), while mouthing about K-pop. Fans revelled in DiCaprio’s almost unprecedented display of offscreen exuberance, with some suggesting that his usual buttoned-down professionalism was “a performance”. This, they claimed, was a rare glimpse at his “real personality”.
In truth, though, the question ought not to be “is this the real DiCaprio?” but, instead, “Why do we care so much?” The hankering for insight into celebrities’ personal lives is nothing new, naturally – as long as there has been a film industry, there have been tabloid journalists and biographers growing fat from veil-lifting reportage and gossip trafficking – but in the age of social media, it has metastasised into a rather more particular fascination with micro-behaviours. People don’t want dirt so much as they want access, often to the most banal crevices of celebrity life. And the more that access is withheld, the more tantalising it becomes.
Increasingly, as happened with DiCaprio’s viral moment, fans are also turning to lip-reading to analyse even the subtlest private aside – and awards shows are a particular nexus for TikTok’s Lip-reading Industrial Complex. In recent years, figures such as Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez have gone viral thanks to inaudible interactions at the Globes, with fans scrutinising every (entirely hypothetical) phoneme on social media to unearth supposed slights. There’s not really much that celebs can do about it either, short of covering their mouths with their hands like all those ridiculous-looking Premier League footballers. As long as they attend these events, there will be cameras. And as long as there are cameras, people will be watching – all too closely.
When it comes to the attentions of social media, there is something particularly alluring about DiCaprio, a man who has juggled an intense personal privacy with outsized screen personas that are quintessential meme material. (The shot of him in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, seated in an armchair and pointing ecstatically at a TV screen, has to rank among the most enduring internet memes in history.) But let’s be clear, there’s a big difference between a flash of awards-do ostentation, and actual transparency. That is to say, I wouldn’t bank on DiCaprio launching a personable curtain-lifting podcast any time soon. (“Leo Season”, anyone? “Chatter Island?”)
No, all that Golden Globes clip really revealed is that DiCaprio knows how to turn on the charm when required. An actor with charisma – who knew?! As for the “real Leonardo DiCaprio”, that’s anyone’s guess. But boy, are we going to keep guessing.
