Today, the now 50-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the few US stars who attract millions to the cinemas with their name alone. He laid the foundation for this as a teenager.
DiCaprio received an Oscar nomination for his first film This Boy’s Life from 1993. He was just 17 years old when filming. However, his relative inexperience in the industry apparently didn’t stop DiCaprio from speaking his mind. What Mark Wahlberg also felt.
Leonardo DiCaprio definitely didn’t want to film with Mark Wahlberg
Mark Wahlberg, who is three years older than him, made a name for himself as a rapper in the group Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch almost at the same time as DiCaprio and also tried his hand at acting. The up-and-coming young stars got involved Casting for the drug drama Jim Carroll – In the Streets of New York (1995) on a collision course.
DiCaprio was about to become the personal iceberg for Wahlberg’s Titanic, as ex-Marky Mark revealed to the Hollywood Reporter in 2013. On the occasion of the war film Lone Survivor, Wahlberg recalled the rivalry and antipathy between the two aspiring stars.
Already Oscar-nominated Leonardo DiCaprio was in the running for the lead role of Jim Carroll, who wrote about his time as a high school basketball star and his heroin addiction in his autobiographical book The Basketball Diaries. Mark Wahlberg, in turn, knew director Scott Kalvert through his music videos and was a candidate for the role of Mickey, one of Jim’s friends in the film. The next step would have been an audition together to test the chemistry of the two, but DiCaprio vetoed it. Wahlberg described the story to THR like this:
Leonardo said: ‘Only over my damn corpse. Marky Mark won’t be in this damn movie.’
Also interesting:
Mark Wahlberg knows the reason for the dislike
Apparently he had previously upset DiCaprio, as Wahlberg further explained:
I didn’t even notice but I was a bit of an asshole to him at a charity basketball game. So he said, ‘That fucking asshole isn’t going to be in this movie.’
In 2014, Wahlberg spoke to the Huffington Post in more detail about the incident and took responsibility for the dispute:
We had a strange encounter at an MTV Rock and Jock basketball game. At halftime I appeared in my underwear and I think I blocked a shot from him. I was a punk. I was an asshole. I wasn’t nice to Leo that day.
As the Hollywood Reporter goes on to say, it’s thanks to casting director Avy Kaufman that Wahlberg was allowed to audition after all. Thanks to persuasion, DiCaprio agreed to read with Wahlberg and the rest is history:
So I come in and audition and I look at him and he looks at me and then we’re doing a scene and they’re like, ‘Hmm, this guy’s pretty good, isn’t he?’ Before you know it, we’ll be hanging out together.
You can get an impression of the atmosphere on set in the archive footage of this Entertainment Tonight report on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Jim Carroll – In the Streets of New York:
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More about the star:
Afterwards, Mark Wahlberg and Leonardo DiCaprio performed again together in Martin Scorsese’s Departed (2006) on, which gave Wahlberg his first and to date only nomination for an acting Oscar.
The next film with Mark Wahlberg will be Mel Gibson’s thriller Flight Risk, which opens in Germany on February 20th. Leonardo DiCaprio will follow in August with the new, as yet untitled film by Paul Thomas Anderson.
A thematically similar article was previously published by our Spanish sister site SensaCine.