It’s not every day younger actors receive an arrow of advice from an actually revered actor. For today’s episode of Filmaesthete’s solicited advice, we bring Leonardo DiCaprio discussing his approach to a successful acting career, stressing patience and thoughtful part selection while cautioning against overexposure.
Leonardo DiCaprio, an Academy Award-winning actor, claims that he has treated his acting career as a “marathon, not a sprint.”
“The thing that I could say more than anything is that if you love this profession, if you love being an actor, you have to realise that it’s a marathon; it’s not a sprint,” the 51-year-old actor, who has been successful in films including Catch Me If You Can, The Departed, and The Wolf of Wall Street, told Deadline.
Here is the whole transcript of his solicited advice; take your time to ponder and reflect upon it.
“if you love being an actor, you have to realize that it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. And that’s not to say, ‘Oh, these are all pivotal choices. Don’t try something commercial. Don’t do this too early.’ It’s about the idea of looking at your career 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now, and putting those building blocks together to last. And maybe overexposure could be damaging … I had somewhat of an instinct early on about overexposure. Granted, it was a different time. It was a time where I watched actors that kind of disappeared into their personal life, and you didn’t know much about them. It’s much different now with social media. But I didn’t get to know much about them except what I saw on screen”
“I got to see them build a body of great work over time, I wasn’t inundated with a massive explosion of too many films by them in one or two years. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t take the work when it’s given to you, but it’s the idea of doling it out, or maybe just taking those films that have great supporting characters that are interesting and making your mark in the industry. I was very fortunate and very lucky, very early on. And with ‘Titanic’, that was the real changing point, when I got to choose my own films. But until then, I did a lot of independent movies. I just went for the character that I thought was most interesting, and something that I could sink my teeth into”
“It’s about the part. And sometimes even being in a movie that is massively successful — that isn’t about the focus on the humanity of these characters, or about making people understand something about the human condition — you don’t even get credit for. It becomes about the subject matter of the movie being successful. There are times when you can reap the rewards of that and times when you can’t. But like I said, I think for young actors it is about saying, ‘I want to be here for a long time. I don’t want to be overexposed'”
Hollywood is no cakewalk, and DiCaprio is always a standing reminder that eventually art loses its glitter and glamour. Artists and audiences will be fatigued by the recurring themes. But here, he prompts the forthcoming generation to ‘go with the flow’ instead of wrecking havoc on their professional lives.
