It is a film industry truism that the movie star is dead, but Leonardo DiCaprio’s career may be evidence that there is still life in the concept. Since he became a bona fide lead actor in the late 1990s, DiCaprio’s films have earned over $7bn, with the actor himself regularly receiving over $20m per movie; he works almost exclusively with the industry’s most heavyweight directors; and he has used his celebrity clout to become a high-profile activist, notably in the fields of climate change and indigenous rights.
DiCaprio’s new film, Martin Scorsese’s gargantuan Killers of the Flower Moon, would appear to be in perfect alignment with all these. DiCaprio, now 48, reportedly received $30m to appear, one of the heftiest fees of his career, putting him near the top of the Hollywood fees ladder (only the $100m-plus Tom Cruise earned for Top Gun: Maverick and the $35m a pre-slap Will Smith received for Emancipation are higher). Scorsese, of course, is arguably America’s most high-status film director, with whom DiCaprio has made five previous feature films. But most pertinently perhaps, Killers of the Flower Moon fully intersects with DiCaprio’s campaigning priorities: it is about the real-life murders of scores of Osage tribal members in the 1920s and 30s, part of a brutal land grab over oil rights.
DiCaprio’s commitment to advocacy has been a long term endeavour: he set up the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation in 1998, shortly after the stellar success of Titanic, and, according to DiCaprio himself, it has disbursed over $100m to a wide variety of environmental projects, including tiger protection in Nepal, restoring coastlines in Somalia and Brazil, and funding reporting organisations including Inside Climate News and Global Fishing Watch, before the foundation’s merger in 2019 into Earth Alliance, a conservation “platform” DiCaprio co-founded with billionaires Brian Sheth and Laurene Powell Jobs. (DiCaprio did receive some criticism for his foundation’s transparency levels: as a “donor-advised fund” it had no obligation to publicly reveal financial information.)
More recently DiCaprio has focused on “rewilding”, pledging large sums to restore natural ecosystems in the Galápagos islands, and co-authoring an article in the Guardian with Galápagos national park director Danny Rueda Córdova, in which rewilding was described as “the revolutionary act of bringing together people and the planet for people and the planet”.
DiCaprio’s interventions in environmental campaigning – which date back to a meeting with then-vice-president Al Gore in 1998 – have been broadly welcomed. UN climate adviser Janos Pasztor told the Guardian in 2016: “When people hear him talk so forcefully and clearly about a particular issue then people listen,” while climate scientist Michael E Mann said: “I was truly impressed by Leo. He follows the issue closely, reads up about it quite a bit … and he understands the nuances of the issues involved.” In a rare interview in 2016, DiCaprio explained his motivations to Rolling Stone magazine: “I am consumed by this … There isn’t a couple of hours a day where I’m not thinking about it. It’s this slow burn. It’s not ‘aliens invading our planet next week and we have to get up and fight to defend our country,’ but it’s this inevitable thing, and it’s so terrifying.” DiCaprio’s seriousness on the issue has gone a considerable way to combatting his image as a party animal and serial dater of younger women. The latter, however, is a contradiction in his character that is likely to dog him for a while yet.
In Killers of the Flower Moon, DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, who marries an Osage woman (played by Lily Gladstone) as part of a plan to acquire her oil rights. Though essentially unsympathetic, the role plays directly into DiCaprio’s campaigning concerns; he has consistently shown support for Indigenous protests against fuel pipelines, including the Dakota Access pipeline and the Coastal GasLink in Canada, and in 2016 joined attempts to curb the oil industry in telling assembled world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos that “our planet cannot be saved unless we leave fossil fuels in the ground where they belong”. In a recent interview DiCaprio even suggested that these same ideas were behind a major rewrite of Killers of the Flower Moon, telling Vogue that “[the original script] just didn’t feel like it got to the heart of it” and the focus was subsequently moved away from the FBI investigation into the Osage murders and on to the experiences of the Osage themselves. Scorsese himself corroborated the idea behind the film’s change of focus, which included changing DiCaprio’s role from an FBI detective to Burkhart, saying to Time magazine that “after a certain point, I realised I was making a movie about all the white guys … which concerned me”.
In fact DiCaprio’s recent acting career has been largely guided by this kind of oblique message-bearing: he accepts juicy – and occasionally highly repugnant – characters in films that can advance a progressive agenda. In Django Unchained, for example, he played racist plantation owner Calvin J Candie in a revenge thriller directed by Quentin Tarantino that channelled anger over the US’s inability to acknowledge the legacy of slavery. In The Revenant, for which DiCaprio won the best actor Oscar, his role as left-for-dead frontiersman Hugh Glass drew attention to the despoliation of the American landscape. More recently, DiCaprio played an astronomy professor in ecological-disaster satire Don’t Look Up. But DiCaprio’s advocacy doesn’t always govern his choice of roles: environmental politics aren’t a consideration in the washed-up TV actor he portrayed in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood or crooked broker Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street.
However, DiCaprio’s Hollywood muscle has allowed him to make a series of hardhitting documentaries that bluntly address these concerns. The 11th Hour, in 2007, warned of impending catastrophe; Before the Flood, in 2016, examined the effects of climate change; and Ice on Fire, in 2019, looked at ways to head off the consequences of methane gas release from the Arctic ice pack. In 2021, he produced two films about threatened marine life: The Loneliest Whale, about the mystery of an isolated cetacean, and Fin, about the menace of shark extinction. And there’s no sign yet that he is going to slow down. “I had a friend say, ‘Well, if you’re really this passionate about environmentalism, quit acting,’” he says. “But you soon realise that one hand shakes the other, and being an artist gives you a platform.”
• Killers of the Flower Moon screens at the London film festival and goes on release on 20 October in cinemas.
