After skyrocketing to fame in his early twenties, Leonardo DiCaprio has become deeply familiar with the inner workings of Hollywood stardom. The 51-year-old often stays out of the spotlight when he’s not promoting an upcoming film, typically venturing out in baseball caps and sunglasses to keep a low profile.
In an interview for TIME’s Entertainer of the Year, Leo opened up about balancing his privacy with his worldwide fame. “It’s been a balance I’ve been managing my whole adult life,” he shared. “And still I’m not an expert. I think my simple philosophy is only get out there and do something when you have something to say, or you have something to show for it. Otherwise, just disappear as much as you possibly can.”
“I was like, ‘OK, how do I have a long career? Because I love what I do, and I feel like the best way to have a long career is to get out of people’s face,'” he added.
Leo’s fame
Leo made his screen debut at just 15 years old, appearing in two episodes of The New Lassie in 1989. He then went on to appear in episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club and Santa Barbara in 1990, before securing the role of Garry Buckham on Parenthood, the short-lived TV spin-off of the popular 1989 film.
The actor’s career really took off when he took on the role of Jack Dawson opposite Kate Winslet’s Rose in James Cameron’s Titanic (1997). James Cameron told People at the 2023 Golden Globes that he had to really “twist his arm” to convince Leo to appear in the movie. “He didn’t want to do a leading man,” Cameron said. “He didn’t want to do it [Titanic]. He thought it was boring.”
© Getty ImagesLeo has previously reflected upon the pros and cons of fame and how he manages being in the public eye. “Before Titanic, I had no conception of what any of that meant. It was shocking,” he told Deadline in 2016. “People said, ‘Do you realize how big of a movie this is?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it’s big. It’s a big movie.’ They’re like, ‘No. No. No, it’s the biggest movie ever,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, what does that mean? So it’s big.’ They’re like, ‘No. No. No, you don’t get it. You don’t understand what this means.’ I thought, okay, great, it made a lot of money, and people are seeing it.”
© Getty Images“My whole life became about things that weren’t about acting,” he said of what happened after the movie. “Titanic was very much an experiment for Kate Winslet and I. We’d done all of these independent movies. I loved her as an actress and she said, ‘Let’s do this together, we can do this.”
He continued: “We did it, and it became something that we could’ve never foreseen. We never predicted that it would be what it was, and I said, ‘Okay, slow down. Let all this pass a little bit, and let’s get back to…find something that…I knew it was going to be an adjustment. I knew there was an expectation of me to do a certain thing at that point, and I knew I had to get back to what my intentions were from the onset.”
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