Leonardo DiCaprio Makes a Rare Comment About the Interest in His Personal Life, ‘Complete Loss’ of Privacy

The 2024 Academy Award nominations are still a few weeks out, but despite being overlooked during Sunday’s Golden Globes, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is already generating plenty of Oscar buzz. When the film was released in October, the stars of the film weren’t able to do any press due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. But now that the strike has ended, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone have given a wide-ranging interview about everything from the importance of the film to the indigenous Osage people to their respective environmentalism activism.

And in a rare instance, DiCaprio responded to a question about the fascination regarding his personal life. Though the 49-year-old actor is notoriously private, he’s constantly hounded by paparazzi hoping to catch a snap of the latest 20-something model, actress, or socialite on his arm.

“As far as my personal life is concerned, you know, my answer is pretty simple. I got into this industry at a very young age,” DiCaprio told The Guardian in an interview published on Sunday, Jan. 7. “I felt incredibly compelled to do this. And the irony is that I was born and raised in Hollywood. People think: ‘Oh, OK, just add water,’ right? But I tried to become an actor multiple times and I got rejected.”

He continued, recalling how he first got his big shot at 12 or 13 years old, and that ever since then his career has felt like winning the lottery. “To be honest, I would have been happy doing any sort of acting jobs—commercials, television.”

“I got the one opportunity doing This Boy’s Life with Robert De Niro,” DiCaprio said, of his first time sharing the big screen with the legendary actor. “I watched his work, realized the calibre of actor that he was and said to myself: ‘I will never squander this opportunity.'”

“So since then, a lot of other stuff comes hand in hand with that. The complete loss of your private life,” he added. “And you know what, a lot of people have to deal with a lot harsher things than having their private life be public knowledge. That’s just one of the byproducts. I feel too lucky to do what I do to sit here and complain about it. It’s just one of the things you have to accept and you adapt.”

Killers of the Flower Moon marked DiCaprio’s sixth time working with Scorsese and the director’s tenth collaboration with De Niro. Previously, in addition to This Boy’s Life, DiCaprio and De Niro appeared together in the 1996 drama Marvin’s Room. But despite the trio’s history together it didn’t stop them from rolling their eyes at the younger actor’s penchant for improvisation during filming.

“Every now and then, Bob and I would look at each other and roll our eyes a little bit,” Scorsese said during an interview when the film was released. “And we’d tell [DiCaprio], ‘You don’t need that dialogue.’”