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Speaking with ComicBook while promoting his new film One Battle After Another (in theaters September 26th), DiCaprio shared that Howard Hughes in The Aviator is the one role that’s stuck with him the most. “It was the first film for me that I’d been thinking about for a long period of time and held that book around about Howard Hughes for like 10 years,” he said. “And then I think I was around 30 years old and I got to do that movie with Scorsese and recreate I was a producer, so to speak, so I felt this whole other responsibility … that was a seminal point in my life, so I suppose it was The Aviator. That character has stuck with me, not in his eccentricities, but just the thought that went into that character.”
The Aviator Was An Important Film In Leonardo DiCaprio’s Career
The Aviator may not necessarily be the first film that comes to mind when thinking about DiCaprio. It wasn’t a major box office hit a la Titanic or Inception, and it fell short of winning key awards during that Oscars season (unlike the next DiCaprio/Scorsese collaboration, The Departed). Still, The Aviator was a watershed moment for DiCaprio’s career in Hollywood. The film was still widely acclaimed, receiving 11 Oscar nominations. Among those was a nod for DiCaprio in Best Actor. It was his first Academy Award nomination after breaking into the mainstream; his first career nomination came for 1993’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape when he was just 19.
Following the record-breaking success of Titanic, DiCaprio had something of a heartthrob image, and headlining an epic biopic like The Aviator was a significant change of pace. Though DiCaprio had previously starred in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, The Aviator was arguably when the film community started taking him seriously as an actor. DiCaprio demonstrated impeccable range in his performance as Howard Hughes, bringing a fascinating and complex figure to life. It was a character that established the type of actor DiCaprio was going to become.
