A starstruck Boris Johnson adopted a “South African” accent when he ran into Leonardo DiCaprio and started quoting lines from the Oscar winner’s films at him.
The former prime minister has revealed in his new book that he met the Hollywood superstar at the Cop26 climate change summit in Glasgow in November 2021.
Mr Johnson explained that he burst out into quotes from the film Blood Diamond in a brief encounter with the actor.
In the 2007 film DiCaprio plays the “brusque, cynical” Danny Archer, a “hard-bitten white Rhodesian gunrunner and gem smuggler” that is set during the Sierra Leone civil war.
He wrote in an extract seen by the Telegraph: “As he quickened his pace, I found myself speaking in a thick South African accent and quoting some of his greatest lines.
“At the sound of the UK PM impersonating DiCaprio impersonating a South African gunrunner, the film star checked his stride. He looked at me appraisingly. ‘I will see you later, my friend’, he said, and stalked off.”
Mr Johnson first described recognising the star in the distance and how he first appeared to want to speak to the then-prime minister. But it quickly turned out the actor just wanted to go to the toilet.
The politician added: “He was ten yards away, striding towards me down the prefab corridor, right here in the convention centre where the world’s leaders had come together to stop the world from being fried.
“He was getting closer. Yes, he seemed to have some business with us, little old us – the UK presidency of the UN conference on climate change, known as COP 26. What could he want?”
But it turned out the Titanic actor did not want “to sound the alarm about the iceberg ahead,” Mr Johnson wrote.
Once the actor left the bathroom Mr Johnson approached him and added that the Hollywood star as “taller and bulkier” than he appeared on screen.
Mr Johnson’s book Unleashed will hit shelves on October 10.
