Leonardo DiCaprio was originally meant to play a different character in Killers of the Flower Moon.
The actor, who has worked with filmmaker Martin Scorsese a total of eight times, appears in the new critically acclaimed David Grann adaptation as Ernest Burkhart.
In the film, Ernest is the nephew of malevolent rancher William Hale (Robert De Niro), and is married to Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a member of the Osage Native American tribe of Osage County, Oklahoma, who find themselves being killed off one-by-one after oil is found on their land in the 1920s.
However, DiCaprio was not originally hired to play Ernest – instead, he was set to play the role of Tom White, the FBI agent sent to Oklahoma by J Edgar Hoover to investigate the string of murders. The role ultimately went to Jesse Plemons instead.
Scriptwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), told the podcast Script Notes in November 2020 that he “argued” with the Wolf of Wall Street star over his demands to play a different character.
He said: “Leonardo wanted some things changed that we argued about. He won half of [the arguments]. I won half of them. So that’s happening.”
The screenplay, much like Grann’s non-fiction book, originally told the story through the eyes of White. However, the script underwent rewrites to position Ernest at the centre of the story and, in the finished film, which is in cinemas now, Tom White does not appear until around the two-hour mark.
Plemons reportedly had to drop out of Jordan Peele’s film Nope to appear in Killers of the Flower Moon, which lasts for three-and-a-half hours. He would have played the role that went to Steven Yeun.
Scorsese attributed the change of the script to a desire to focus more on the perspective of members of the Osage tribe.
He told IndieWire: “We realised that was really the heart of the film. And having met with the Osage so many times and heard from Margie Burkhart, who was the great-great-granddaughter of Ernest, she knew them. She kept saying, ‘Don’t forget it isn’t as simple as villains and victims. You have to remember Mollie and Ernest were in love.’ And that always stayed with me when we were still working on the other version of the script.
Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’— (Apple TV+)
“I said, “Well, if they’re in love, we got to show that too.” And then that became difficult in terms of showing all the machinations of the Bureau investigation.”
Killers of the Flower Moon is out now, and will be available to stream on Apple TV+ in November.
