Leonardo DiCaprio has shared that the older he gets, the more he finds it "harder and harder to articulate" himself, in part because he struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety. "It feels very difficult because you just feel self-conscious and strange, " the actor says. The world fell in love with the former child actor in the 1996 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and 1997's tearjerker Titanic, and it's hard to believe he is now 50. Despite working across four decades, the Academy Award- and Bafta Award-winning star has acted in fewer than 35 films, but each performance has been memorable, including his roles in The Wolf of Wall Street, The Great Gatsby and The Revenant.
His turn in the new action film One Battle After Another is another high-impact one, not least because Leo’s Bob is so different from the impeccably dressed version of himself that the actor presents to the world. Leo may rarely do comedy, but in his surprising new role, he’s hilarious as a former revolutionary and now a paranoid pothead and single dad, hopelessly trying to raise a teenage daughter. Taking a cue from Jeff Bridges' immortal The Big Lebowski, he portrays a bathrobe-wearing stoner called Bob who languishes on the couch in a ratty robe with a manbun and a bong in his hand; his self-reliant daughter, Willa, has long been the only adult in this relationship.
Once revered as the "Rocketman", thanks to his skills with explosives, Bob is now a lonely, sad shell of himself without his partner in crime, the formidable radical known as Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), also the mother of his daughter. Bob’s greatest fear is Sean Penn’s twisted Colonel Lockjaw, who - still furious after Perfidia escaped his clutches more than a decade ago - will stop at nothing to capture Willa, but Bob has been living off-grid for so long that he can’t even remember who the enemy is, let alone the secret passwords required to summon his comrades to action.
"[Bob] doesn’t necessarily make the right choices, and is then left on his own to raise this child and is completely ill-equipped. He's haunted by his past. Perfidia leaves a wake of carnage through every character in this movie, and he's trying to be a father and failing miserably," says Leo. "It's not this utopian happy villager set-up. It's a father disconnecting with his daughter. He's a disaster of a father, and then, all of a sudden, he's put into this wild circumstance to try to save her."
The Oscar winner had long wanted to work with director Paul Thomas Anderson, who is celebrated for films including Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood. "Just the imagination of this world where he's pushing these extremes; but it's also so topical and holding up a mirror to society right now,"' Leo says of the movie, which opens with a nightmare scenario showing cages full of immigrants at the US border.
"I would have done anything Paul asked me to do, but this felt incredibly pertinent to where we are as a society. I love the idea of this ex-revolutionary trying to connect with his daughter. He doesn't have a phone and she lives off a generational miscommunication between them. He's trying to be a good dad, but he's failing at every stop. He doesn't know how to do it."
Leo, who is not a father himself, has been romantically involved with the models Gisele Bündchen, Bar Refaeli, Toni Garrn, and Camila Morrone, and is currently dating Vittoria Ceretti, 27.
"Just the set-up of what Bob would be doing when his daughter gets kidnapped and his past comes back to haunt him – he’d be sitting there stoned out of his mind, paranoid and in a robe,” Leo smiles, noting that Bob is in his bathrobe for two-thirds of the movie, during which he falls off a roof, gets Tasered, is arrested, escapes and generally muddles his way through trying to find his daughter.
© Getty Images"There's a traditional way to play this character, but Paul always takes an unexpected route. It's the sheer pursuit of never giving up on the person that he loves, and that's [Bob’s] heroism, at the end of the day. He’s a relentless hound dog falling off roofs, but he never gives up. He’s a flawed protagonist, which I love to play,” says Leo, who has also appeared in The Departed, Inception, The Aviator, Killers of The Flower Moon, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “And what happens when you set up a character who’s supposed to protect his daughter and defy all odds? He can't remember the goddamn password. That dominates his whole character in the first two acts. I'm too stoned to remember the password! I can't get out of the gate. So it's those unexpected choices and that sort of absurdity that makes this film unique to me.”
One Battle After Another is in cinemas from Friday September 26.
