Leonardo DiCaprio

Don’t you know that there are starving actors who have never known the joy of winning an Oscar? Actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, who has long suffered (figuratively and literally) for the chance to have what so many take for granted. For the small price of just one pair of gold earrings or maybe an old silver necklace, you can help actors like Leo here finally get the Oscar he deserves. Please, won’t you think of Leo?

Leonardo DiCaprio arguably went Peak Leo with The Revenant, a film that is essentially a two-hour frontier-style reimagining of his quaalude scene in The Wolf of Wall Street. While we wait to find out whether all his suffering and bison liver-eating and vape withdrawals will pay off with a long-deserved Oscar, DiCaprio is already going back to work with one of the screenwriters of The Revenant on a new film that will presumably torture the actor once more.

Seemingly sensing a previously untapped source of income, Leonardo DiCaprio has signed on to produce a YA adaptation of his very own. The actor and producer's Appian Way banner is partnering with Paramount to back Sandcastle Empire, a climate change-centric YA tale from author Kayla Olson. As with most YA properties, this one features a female lead and a dystopian future — surprise!

Leonardo DiCaprio is many things: a great actor, a philanthropist, a member of the famous P—y Posse, a quick draw with a water gun…and apparently an expert on Russian history. The actor has portrayed many very flawed characters based on very flawed real-life men, but there’s one man he hasn’t played yet: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

‘The Revenant’ won Best Motion Picture Drama at the 2016 Golden Globes on Sunday.

Leonardo DiCaprio won Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama for his role in ‘The Revenant’ at the 2016 Golden Globes.

By the year 1999, a time when ‘Star Wars’ devotees waited with bated breath for the triumphant return of their most cherished franchise with not one but three new installments, Leonardo DiCaprio had already done some solid work. He had broken out big as a youngster in role alongside Robert De Niro and Johnny Depp in ‘This Boy’s Life’ and ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,’ respectively. He had proven his chops as an actor with a meaty role in ‘The Basketball Diaries’ and attained full sex-icon status through dreamboat appearances in ‘Romeo + Juliet’ as well as ‘Titanic,’ which also made DiCaprio one of the most highly bankable stars on the planet.

The Revenant has sold itself in trailers as a story of revenge, but to hear director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and screenwriter Mark L. Smith tell it, this is a movie about a “spiritual journey.” We’ll have to wait another week to see if that’s what audiences ultimately take from the film, but according to Smith, The Revenant wasn’t originally conceived as a revenge tale — it was something a little different, and a little more interesting.

How good does a movie have to look to offset its other deficiencies? The Revenant is as beautiful a movie as has ever been made. The photography by master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki is inconceivably gorgeous; sweeping wide shots that juxtapose tiny, insignificant men against the overwhelming grandeur of nature, close-ups so intimate they seem like invasions of the actors’ privacy, and action sequences of shocking violence.

This Christmas we’re getting not one, but two violent films in brutally cold wintertime settings, because nothing says the holidays like blood splattered across snow — according to Quentin Tarantino and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, anyway. A new TV spot for Iñárritu’s The Revenant has arrived online, and just as the title suggests, it features a lot of Leonardo DiCaprio fighting (and fighting…and fighting…) to survive.