They say no man is an island – even if, like Leonardo DiCaprio, they own their own private one. But is that really true? There has always been something remote about the 51-year-old star of Titanic and One Battle After Another. It’s a mystique that Golden Globes host Nikki Glaser touched on at last weekend’s awards ceremony, after cracking wise about DiCaprio’s age-gap dating history. “I’m sorry I made that joke,” she said. “It’s cheap. I tried not to, but like... we don’t know anything else about you, man. There’s nothing else. Like open up. I’m serious. I looked. I searched. The most in-depth interview you’ve ever given was in Teen Beat magazine in 1991. Is your favourite food still pasta, pasta, and more pasta?”
She’s not wrong: even by movie-star standards, DiCaprio remains more or less a complete cipher off-screen. We know he supports the LA Lakers. We know he likes the environment. (His private Caribbean island, Blackadore Caye, is said to house something called a luxury “eco-resort”.) But what else? Does he have a sense of humour? Does he have a Netflix account? Does he doomscroll into the wee hours? Beyond his aforementioned dating history (about which only the vaguest details ever really surface), the only solid narratives around DiCaprio are professional ones. For years, he was defined by his fruitless – even, as popular logic had it, desperate – pursuit of an Academy Award: the decades-long snubbing became a meme in and of itself. After missing out on the prize for films such as What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993), The Aviator (2004) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), DiCaprio finally exorcised that demon with 2015’s The Revenant, now best remembered as the film in which an incessantly gurning Leo gets mauled by a bear and eats raw bison liver.
