A recently viral tweet has movie fans clowning on Leonardo DiCaprio for apparently being nervous about kissing an older co-star.
In a thread detailing the making of The Wolf of Wall Street (in celebration of its anniversary), it’s noted that DiCaprio was so nervous about kissing Joanna Lumley, the actress who plays Aunt Emma, that it took multiple attempts to get a take that director Martin Scorsese liked.
Naturally, given DiCaprio’s dating history, this prompted quite a response on Twitter, as a tweet pointing out how Leo has no problem slicing his hand up with glass — a reference to the infamous scene in Django Unchained — but clams up when he needs to kiss an older woman has racked up over 134,000 likes (at the time of this writing).
this is so funny dicaprio can slice his hand open with a glass and keep his composure but the one thing that scares him is having to kiss a woman older than 30 https://t.co/ce3oqA7Fw8
— Cian š®šŖ (@nodrectionhome) August 9, 2023
Further tweets echoed a similar sentiment, pointing to DiCaprio’s commitment to his performance inĀ The Revenant,Ā as well:
Leonardo DiCaprio has no problem sleeping inside dead animal carcasses or eating raw bison livers, but you ask him to kiss a woman older than 25, and thatās when he starts having panic attacks š https://t.co/UMPg7MpPfO
— Tš£įI (@RexKwonDo92) August 10, 2023
martin scorsese when leo kissed a woman over 25 https://t.co/UEwdUXKFOb pic.twitter.com/N4Ty7fLKmQ
— dinah (@canarysfilm) August 9, 2023
Leo trying to kiss girls older than 25 pic.twitter.com/UQjaRfoWT7 https://t.co/5eJN1wqMFA
— alien superstar (@cityxkid) August 9, 2023
However, because this is Twitter — and *especially* now that they’re calling themselves X — we couldn’t simply take the tweet at face value, so we did some research for ourselves to confirm the veracity of this anecdote. And luckily, for the sake of the banter, it’s true!
Here’s what Lumley said about filming the scene back in 2014:
āIt took us 27 takes…. āSorry, Martin, didnāt get that quite right, can we go again?ā” Lumley joked to Mirror just a year after the film’s release.
Then, two years later on The Graham Norton Show, she confirmed that Leo was feeling some nerves on the day of the kiss scene.
“We went for it but there was a lot of peppermint involved as we were both quite anxious about it,” Lumley said.
She then further confirmed the awkwardness of the interaction in an interview with The Telegraph in 2017:
“I did kiss Leonardo DiCaprio, about 15 times in fact. But Iāll let you into a secret. Itās actually no fun kissing actors, no fun at all. There are so many takes and you both have to chew so much chewing gum. Itās like kissing someone in a dentistās waiting room.”
According to reports from early July, DiCaprio is in the midst of dating 28-year-old model Gigi Hadid, which comes on the heels of him ending his four-year-long relationship with actress and model Camilla Marrone.