It is a film industry truism that the movie star is dead, but Leonardo DiCaprio’s career may be evidence that there is still life in the concept. Since he became a bona fide lead actor in the late 1990s, DiCaprio’s films have earned over $7bn, with the actor himself regularly receiving over $20m per movie; he works almost exclusively with the industry’s most heavyweight directors; and he has used his celebrity clout to become a high-profile activist, notably in the fields of climate change and indigenous rights.
DiCaprio’s new film, Martin Scorsese’s gargantuan Killers of the Flower Moon, would appear to be in perfect alignment with all these. DiCaprio, now 48, reportedly received $30m to appear, one of the heftiest fees of his career, putting him near the top of the Hollywood fees ladder (only the $100m-plus Tom Cruise earned for Top Gun: Maverick and the $35m a pre-slap Will Smith received for Emancipation are higher). Scorsese, of course, is arguably America’s most high-status film director, with whom DiCaprio has made five previous feature films. But most pertinently perhaps, Killers of the Flower Moon fully intersects with DiCaprio’s campaigning priorities: it is about the real-life murders of scores of Osage tribal members in the 1920s and 30s, part of a brutal land grab over oil rights.
