Leonardo DiCaprio, once the man of the moment, has quietly reinvented himself as a supporting player in leading man's clothing. At this year's Oscars, the star of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another was reduced to clapping and twitching his moustache, while the film swept major awards. Even director Anderson forgot to thank his cast in his Best Director speech, a snub that mirrored DiCaprio's role as forgettable middle-aged dad Bob Ferguson.
Anderson's film won Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and a Best Supporting Actor gong for Sean Penn. DiCaprio's Ferguson was simultaneously central and peripheral, a performance so perfect it seemed superfluous. This marks a pattern: in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), he played second fiddle to Brad Pitt; in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), he was Robert De Niro's lapdog; and in Don't Look Up (2021), he hid in the ensemble. Ferguson is not an outlier but a C-list creation from an A-lister.
The first two acts of DiCaprio's career are on display this month with the 30th anniversary reissue of Romeo + Juliet (1996) and an IMAX presentation of The Revenant (2015). The former made him a star; the latter finally won him a Best Actor Oscar after snubs for The Aviator, Blood Diamond, and The Wolf of Wall Street. Revisited, both films hold up, but they show how much he has evolved. He is now a more interesting actor than the boyish Romeo or the dogged survivor.
Now 51, DiCaprio works at a glacial pace—eight films in 10 years—and is drawn to flawed, unheroic characters. This high-risk strategy could alienate his agent, but it has yielded a third act more intriguing than the first two. He is no longer the fresh-faced lover or the hardy trapper; he is a sleight-of-hand magician, top-lined yet deep-cover, proving that there are second acts in American lives—and third ones too.
