By now, we’ve all seen the trailer for Leonardo DiCaprio’s new frontiersman flick, The Revenant. It looks totally badass. Just Leo out there in the wilderness, fending off bear attacks, and seeking vengeance on the guy who left him for dead. No way it can’t be good.
And if the details that Dicaprio shared in a recent interview are even the least bit true, well, you’ve got to think he’s going to be in contention for that elusive Oscar for Best Actor come February. Dude claims he was straight-up sleeping in animal carcasses for the role. That’s commitment to the game.
From Vanity Fair:
in a new interview, DiCaprio makes it clear that making the movie was, in some ways, just as agonizing as what his character endures in the story.
“I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do,” the actor tells Yahoo. “Whether it’s going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set. [I was] enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly.”
As for what he ingested in the wild, let’s leave it at this: “I certainly don’t eat raw bison liver on a regular basis,” DiCaprio teases. “When you see the movie, you’ll see my reaction to it, because Alejandro kept it in. It says it all. It was an instinctive reaction.”
Listen, I don’t know if Leonardo Dicaprio is exaggerating here. But in my head, I’m imagining him sleeping outside in the freezing cold every night, using freshly gutted (by his own hands) buffalo carcasses to stay warm. Holding back vomit as he chows down on raw bison liver, over and over again, just to ensure the shots are perfect. Reveling in the hypothermia because it makes the role more authentic.
If that’s the case, dude better get an Oscar this time around. Or else he’s literally going to resort to murdering real people for his upcoming role as a serial killer in Devil In The White City.
Oh, he also came face-to-face with a real, live bear. You hear that, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences!? A LIVE FUCKING BEAR!
DiCaprio also discusses filming the graphic bear-attack scene, which involved cables and precise choreography.
“[Those scenes]—amongst many other sequences—were some of the more difficult things I’ve ever had to do in my entire career,” DiCaprio says. “But the end result is going to be one of the most immersive experiences audiences will ever have with what it would be like to come face-to-face with an animal of that magnitude that is incredibly primal.”
Despite his many sacrifices for the role, DiCaprio says he doesn’t regret his decision to take on the project.
“The truth is that I knew what I was getting into,” the actor continues. “This was a film that had been floating around for quite some time, but nobody was crazy enough to really take this on, simply because of the logistics of where we needed to shoot and the amount of work and rehearsal that would have to be done to achieve Alejandro and [cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki] vision.”
Just give him the goddamn Oscar already before he dies trying! Please.
[via Vanity Fair]