Centipede

DEFINING LEO

1｜Christopher Nolan
"Leo is someone I had been trying to work with for years. I’d met him many times and nothing had come together, but I finally managed to convince him with this one and he brought an incredible amount of emotional focus to his character"

2｜Martin Scorsese
"We’re a different generation, but he goes in the same places that I want to go. He’s not afraid to go there. He’s not afraid to deal with that part of himself and that’s interesting. We have different context, we grew up differently, but I think we speak the same language emotionally and psychologically. It’s very lucky"

3｜Meryl Streep
"He’s always really compelling. You can’t watch anything else while he’s acting""He’s a genius. He’s insane. And completely wild and he didn’t listen to me at all. And I was his mother!"

4｜Leo himself
“My grandmother died, Oma. She was 93. She lived a long, great life. I loved being with Oma at all times, she was completely pure and honest. She was so unlike anything else. She was my barometer of truth. I always brought Oma around to meet people, just to hear her immediate take on them. She was so unaffected. She’d give me her opinion, no matter what was going on. Sometimes I’d ask Oma, ‘Isn’t it great now, all this stuff happening in my life?’ And she’d say, ‘Don’t you worry about that. Take a break. Be a bricklayer. Work with your hands. You’ll love it. Step back and reflect on what’s going on in your life. Appreciate it.’”

5｜Kate Winslet
“He’d walk onto the set in the morning, after, like, a half hour’s sleep or something, and that face — it took your breath away. I just looked at him, having been through hair and makeup for hours, and wailed, ‘You fucker!’ He just practically rolled out of bed and looked that gorgeous. He can’t take compliments, absolutely hates them, and he goes, ‘Shut up!’ and gets me in a headlock and wrestles me to the ground. I love him dearly. I bullied him into doing the movie, because it takes a long time for him to make decisions. He likes to be advised by all his close friends and family, which was terribly frustrating for me because, with me, it’s always gut feeling. We became such good friends, so close, absolutely like brother and sister. We’ve talked about everything. We’ve laid our souls out on a slab to each other, in one way or another.”

6｜Carey Mulligan
"Leonardo is the most incredible actor on the planet,.. I walked away from my audition and I couldn’t believe that I’d been acting with him…. At the audition, we had been acting out these scenes together. We did 15 takes of one scene. He didn’t really have much dialogue as Gatsby, and the camera was never on him, but he played three other characters. He’d say a line as Gatsby, and then he’d jump up and play Tom Buchanan. We were doing the scene with the cameras over my shoulder, and he was lighting a cigarette for me and looking at me. It was all me, and he didn’t have any words, and he was improvising stuff to say, just to help me. I was like, “Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t need to be helping me in this audition.” He was auditioning girls all day. I was so blown away by how generous he was, let alone being amazing to act with."