Redmayne did some noteworthy physical acting to play Hawking, but nothing he did matched up to Keaton’s bombastic, desperate washed-up actor trying to stage a comeback. In 2015, Eddie Redmayne won the Best Actor Oscar for portraying Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything that should have gone to Michael Keaton for his standout performance in Birdman.
There’s a potential world where DiCaprio winning his Oscar at the current time changes the Oscar fates of two other actors.
But it’s also fun to think about how Oscar history might have changed for the better if the Academy had made the right decision in 2014. There’s more than enough available evidence to make it clear DiCaprio was robbed of an Oscar for The Wolf of Wall Street. This is an important growth marker for what Jordan eventually becomes, which DiCaprio expertly lays down. Look at how uncomfortable he is with Mark’s lifestyle and the chest-beating thing he does in a crowded restaurant. When the film begins, DiCaprio’s Jordan is a wide-eyed Wall Street pup internalizing terrible life advice from, ironically, McConaughey’s Mark Hanna. That decision by the Academy wasn’t alright, alright, alright. It just so happens that he went up against DiCaprio’s best performance, which in retrospect slightly taints his win. He should have won the 2014 Best Actor Oscar for that role, which would’ve ended the “Leo Will Never Win an Oscar” narrative two years before he finally won the coveted statue.įor the record, that sentiment is by no means meant to take away from Matthew McConaughey’s impressive and Oscar-winning work in Dallas Buyers’ Club. That last performance in particular is arguably the best of DiCaprio’s career, as he got a chance to fully embody a deplorable human being from the beginning of his terribleness to his reign’s bitter end. That was the case for his villainous Calvin Candie (who was deeply racist, wealth notwithstanding) in Django Unchained, tortured Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby and awful Wall Street tycoon Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street. He’s proven to be a versatile actor who can play just about any type of character imaginable.īut he also happens to have a knack for portraying folks with too much money and too little perspective on what their wealth has done to them morally.
The man has one of most diverse IMDb pages of any working actor, with roles ranging from his Titanic heartthrob to his unstable undercover cop in The Departed to his frontiersman fighting for survival in The Revenant. Leonardo DiCaprio is really, really good at playing rich, over-privileged jerks. On the fifth anniversary of the film’s release, let’s revisit DiCaprio’s career-best performance as Wall Street scum Jordan Belfort.
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