Leonardo DiCaprio has been acting since the tender age of 5-years-old, and since then has had a legendary career that included winning 76 awards and 194 nominations. But his extraordinary career was almost railroaded very early in his life when he nearly quit the business to pursue a career in… break dancing.
Leonardo once told Oprah, that when he was 11-years-old, he almost quit acting to be a professional break dancer. He probably made the correct decision to stick with that acting stuff.
“Now, don’t ask me to break dance because I’ve since lost my moves, but I was a break dancer and I had a choppy, sort of punky haircut,” Leo said.
Apparently he was pretty decent and the bad-ass b-boy windmilled and wormed his way to a second place finish in a small German competition. Before he was Leo, he was a break dancing b-boy named “Noodle.” From now on I will only recognize Leonardo DiCaprio as “Noodle.”
“That’s from way, way back when I was a little kid, in my pop-locking days,” he told Oprah.
Leo almost quit again after the historic success of the movie Titanic and being featured in many heart-throb magazines, DiCaprio almost walked away from Hollywood.
“It was pretty disheartening to be objectified like that, I wanted to stop acting for a little bit,” DiCaprio said. “It changed my life in a lot of ways, but at the same time, I can’t say that it didn’t give me opportunities. It made me, for the first time, in control of my career.”
But don’t expect DiCaprio to quit acting any time soon.
“There’s no other art form in the world that affects me more,” Leo said. “There’s nothing that I walk away from feeling transformed by the way I do with cinema.”
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be video of Leo poppin’ n lockin’, so these GIFs from Wolf of Wall Street will have to do.
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[HuffPo]