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| By Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty Images |
Many of Leonardo DiCaprio’s
most defining roles—Frank Abagnale Jr., Howard Hughes, Hugo Glass, Jim
Carroll, Jordan Belfort, and more—have been portraits of real-life
divisive men. And it looks like DiCaprio is in no rush to leave the
world of biopics anytime soon. When asked about the controversial
Russian president Vladimir Putin, DiCaprio spoke enthusiastically about tackling the role.
“Putin would be very, very, very interesting. I would love to play him,” DiCaprio told the German paper Welt am Sonntag.
But Putin isn’t the only famous Russian DiCaprio has his eye on. “I
think there should be more films about Russian history because it has
many stories worthy of Shakespeare,” DiCaprio said, according to a
translation in The Guardian. “That is fascinating for an actor. Lenin also would be an interesting role. I would like also to star as Rasputin.”
DiCaprio recently had a chance to show off his Russian accent while relating the story of an emergency plane landing on Ellen
earlier this month. That plane, it turns out, was actually taking
DiCaprio to meet Putin back in 2010 for a conference on the endangered
Siberian tiger in St. Petersburg. You can judge the accent for yourself
right around the three-minute mark.
DiCaprio encountered not one, but two serious plane issues on his way
to meet with Putin, and his determination to make the journey to St.
Petersburg anyway prompted then Prime Minister Putin to interrupt his
speech on tigers to praise DiCaprio. “I would like to thank you for
coming despite all the obstacles . . . A person with less stable nerves
could have decided against coming, could have read it as a sign—that it
was not worth going,” Putin said
to DiCaprio in front of a crowd, before calling him a “muzhik,” which
translates to “real man” in Russian. We can only imagine what the adventurous, outdoorsy Putin thought of DiCaprio after The Revenant.
For his part, DiCaprio said he enjoyed meeting Putin and that the two
men talked mostly of environmental issues rather than politics. “My
foundation has provided financial support for several projects for the
protection of these big cats,” DiCaprio told Welt am Sonntag. “Putin and I talked only about the protection of these magnificent animals, not politics.”
According to the BBC,
when he met Putin, DiCaprio told the prime minister that two of his
late grandparents were Russian and that he had always wanted to take his
grandmother to St. Petersburg, so a grand Russian role for DiCaprio does
seem somewhat inevitable. Putin feels like a pretty solid fit, but if
DiCaprio decides to go the Rasputin route instead, he’s going to have to
re-grow that Revenant beard . . . and then some.
