In a career spanning the better part of 3 decades, Leonardo Di Caprio has essayed the role of an outright villain a grand total of 1 time – Django Unchained. And well, I like the way you villain, boy.
Quentin Tarantino typically writes significant parts with an actor in mind. And for Django Unchained, he wrote the part of Calvin Candie with a particular actor in mind, but it wasn’t Di Caprio.
But after all was said and done, it was Leonardo Di Caprio, the once-quintessential Golden Boy of Hollywood who secured the part, and the rest is history.
Calvin Candie is despicable. He is extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile. And Di Caprio shed decades worth of charming leading man stock to play the part with the authenticity that he did.
Candie has that Landa-esque quality to him – he is despicable yes, but you can’t look away. Di Caprio doesn’t let you look away. Tarantino considers Candie to be the only character he’s written that he truly despises.
Di Caprio takes Candie’s vile nature and runs with it; he is the outright star of every scene he’s featured in. It isn’t much of a stretch then to learn that Di Caprio was Tarantino’s first choice for the part of Landa.
Django Unchained has strong performances all around, but Di Caprio is the film’s ace in the hole.
It’s rather incredible that after putting in the work he did in The Wolf of Wall Street and Django Unchained in back-to-back years, Di Caprio finally nabbed his Oscar for his significantly weaker work in The Revenant.
Christoph Waltz won Best Supporting Actor that year. Di Caprio wasn’t even nominated. That is all kinds of insane, but then again, that’s the Oscars.
Awards aside, with time, the potency of Di Caprio’s performance has only increased. He leads the film’s most powerful scene – the blood-soaked dinner table discussion. And of course, the story of how he cut his hand and kept on acting has now become legend.
Few have ever questioned Di Caprio’s capabilities as an actor, but with Django Unchained, he certainly exceeded my expectations.
It wasn’t only a part that was ostensibly outside of his wheelhouse; it was challenging for other reasons as well.
During the filming of one of the dinner scenes, Di Caprio had to stop the scene because he was having “a difficult time” using so many racial slurs. Samuel L. Jackson then pulled him aside telling him, “Motherfucker, this is just another Tuesday for us.”
The part of Calvin Candie was certainly not just another Tuesday for Leonardo Di Caprio, but he nailed it nonetheless. There were a lot of lies said around the dinner table that night, but that you can believe.
Image source Google
Thanks for Reading
0 Comments