10 Actors That Totally Overprepared For A Role
2. Leonardo DiCaprio Slept In Real Animal Carcasses - The Revenant
Leonardo DiCaprio’s storied career is marked with great films and many awards but for the longest time a Best Actor win at the Oscars infamously evaded him.
That was until 2015's The Revenant: a bleak, snow-capped film about survival against the harshest realities of nature where DiCaprio plays a man driven by self-preservation and vengeance. The film finally saw DiCaprio grab the award that eluded him for so long in a performance described by Peter Travers of Rolling Stone as “thrilling in its brute force and silent eloquence.”
DiCaprio was applauded for his commitment to the role, which was highlighted by interviews given before its release where he revealed just to what extent he had gone.
“I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. Whether it’s going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set. [I was] enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly.”
There’s movie magic and then there’s actual survival skills. The Revenant’s arduous shoot was so difficult that it lost many crew members along the way. DiCaprio knew what he had signed up for, which is why he went as far as to eat raw bison liver for the film, describing his revulsion in the finished picture as “an instinctive reaction”.