‘Ferrari’ Wheelman Gabriel Leone Breaks From the Pack

Bob Wolfenson

My conversation with Gabriel Leone begins with him recalling one of the saddest days of his life. Fifteen years ago, his favorite soccer club, Fluminense, lost the Copa Libertadores (the South American Champions League) in penalty kicks. “It was in our stadium in Rio, and we lost with all of our fans there,” laments the actor and musician, who hails from the club’s home of Rio de Janeiro.

One of Leone's first pieces of clothing was a Fluminense uniform; Leone inherited his love for the tri-color team from his father, along with an affinity for Technicolor epics and musicals.

“The first movie I've ever cried watching in my life was Hair," Leone says of the 1979 adaptation, which he says is still his favorite. The emotionally overwhelming button of Milos Forman's film, in which the cast performs Let the Sunshine In at Arlington Cemetery, struck a nerve with the young man. His mother was a fan of Disney's animated films. When Leone talks about his family collecting the Disney VHS tapes, I’m immediately transported to the row of white plastic clamshell cases from my youth.

Those influences would eventually shape his blossoming but accomplished acting career; Leone seems determined to identify the limits of his abilities and push further and further outside his comfort zone. “I'm always looking,” he says, “for a character and for a project that's going to challenge me.”

Fifteen years later, Fluminense won that very championship for the first time in its history, and Leone has racked up triumphs of his own, playing a pivotal role in a Michael Mann film, starring in the most-watched non-English series in Amazon’s history, and portraying Brazilian legend Ayrton Senna in a Netflix series that debuts later this year.

His first performance had a much more intimate audience. Tasked with producing their own play for a history project, his eighth grade class chose the musician Cazuza as their subject. “It was a one night only presentation for the parents of our class,” said Leone, who was unaware his performance would act as a de facto audition.

Thanks to his turn as the 80s rocker, Leone was invited to sit in on a local theater company's rehearsals. Months later, he made his proper stage debut in a production of Taming of the Shrew. He would perform more of Shakespeare’s works, along with those of important Brazilian authors, but he found there were obstacles to branching out.

“For theater, the only thing you could find was musical auditions,” said Leone. Though he played in a band and had some training in school, he decided to bolster his talents with dance and singing classes. He moved from stage to screen, soon finding prominence in the Brazilian telenovela Hidden Truths.

Leone scored his first major role as the title character in Dom. The series charts the rise of Pedro Dom, the son of a narcotics detective who transitions into a favela gang lord. Though both Leone and his character are from Rio, they come from different backgrounds with a decade between them. While Leone hails from the north, Pedro Dom represented the experiences of many from the south who had opportunities but lost themselves in drug addiction. “Cocaine was a massive thing in Brazil,” Leone says, “but specifically in Rio.”

The character of Pedro Dom is not just key-bump-in-the-bathroom high. He’s often out of his mind, a level of high for which Leone needed to divine and maintain an intense degree of energy. “It was one of the biggest challenges of my life,” he says, “because it demands so much from my body, from my mind, from my emotions.”

A vital part of Pedro Dom is his innate charisma—one that would convince others to follow him and oppose the existing hierarchy of the underworld. It’s a movie star quality Leone provides almost purely. At times in Dom, as as his character smokes weed and romances his rival’s gal, Leone looks a bit too much like Marlon Brando to just ignore.

After Dom conquered the Amazon streaming charts, Leone’s next project would paradoxically bring him back to his roots while also taking his career to the next level.

Along with epics like Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments and William Wyler's Ben Hur, his father loved Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. “I remember I was super young when we watched it together,” said Leone, who was shook by Mann's realism. “I remember spending days after that struggling to sleep.”

Leone would have the privilege to experience Mann's process first-hand when he portrayed the daredevil aristocrat Fon de Potago in Ferrari; Leone’s father, meanwhile, got to take his first trip to Europe to watch his son be directed by Mann. “I couldn't stop thinking about me and my dad watching The Last of the Mohicans for the first time,” said Leone. “And then I was there with him and with Michael.”

“I asked Michael, gently, if I could introduce him to my father,” said Leone, who had to act as translator between the two. When he asked Mann if he could take a picture of them together, the director insisted Leone be in the photo as well. “To have this picture with Michael and my dad, it was like a full circle.”

Mann is known for the realism he imbues into the austere majesty of films like Heat and Ali –a verisimilitude accomplished by immersing himself in intense research. Leone describes Mann's process as one where the director understands the universe of his films from the inside out. But despite Mann's preparation and attention to detail, Leone was amazed by the auteur's desire to experiment. “He was always searching for something different,” said Leone, recalling performing multiple takes while Mann pursued some ineffable thing that wasn't on the page or in his own head. “He was opening himself not only to the actors,” Leone says, “but to the life of the scenes, to the unexpected.”

Playing Portago, a figure worthy of his own biopic, brought Leone into the unfamiliar world of motorsport. He took lessons two to three times a week, learning how to handle a car with the proper aggressive mindset. In one session that changed everything, Leone recalled his instructor, a trained stunt driver, attempting to impart the valiant philosophy of a professional motorsport driver.

The instructor felt Leone’s driving was too cautious, so he pointed out two safety areas on the track. He encouraged Leone to push past his instincts and brake later, which would risk loss of control of the car. “He said ‘You're not going to die,’” Leone recalled. “That was when I started feeling the sensation of crossing the limit.” It was an indispensable lesson for his next role –a legendary driver that many believe best embodied the true spirit of a racer.

Ayrton Senna once said, “if you no longer go for a gap that exists, you are no longer a racing driver,” alluding to the relentless disposition the sport requires. But Senna wasn’t just one of motorsport’s greatest competitors—he was an icon of the Brazilian people. While Americans have collectively mourned national figures, it's difficult to identify an analog. In Richard Williams's book The Death of Ayrton Senna, an 18-year-old named Silvia Barros is quoted as saying Senna “was our hero. Our only one.”

Senna met his untimely death at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, one year after Leone was born. “Even if I wasn't there watching him race, he's one of my idols because I'm Brazilian,” Leone says. “This is something about us.” Leone grew up listening to stories from his family of the much-needed exuberance Senna brought his country throughout his legendary Formula 1 career, as well as the devastation that came with his demise.

So important was Senna to the people of an economically struggling Brazil that a three-mile queue formed at his state funeral. The seven-hour wait to catch a mere glimpse of his closed casket, which was guarded by two soldiers with pikes and four riflemen, was a fraction of the three days of mourning Brazil's then-president declared, including a day off at all state schools.

Netflix's upcoming series about the life of the three-time F1 world champion coincides with the 30th anniversary of his death. Leone's lack of a connection to motorsport may be due to the country-wide trauma caused by the driver’s death. “I still feel,” Leone says, “that people from Brazil don't have this connection with F1 anymore.”

You would think playing a tragically killed driver in a Michael Mann film would have contributed to Leone’s casting as Ayrton Senna, but you (and me) would be wrong. “It was totally different, but it happened at almost the same time,” said Leone.

When I asked about the challenge of portraying a legend as a real person, he returned to what he learned that day on the race track. “I see this line of competitiveness,” Leone said. “Competitiveness can be a tough thing, not only for you but the people around you.” In footage of a post-victory Senna, Leone notes, “you could see him crying, and melancholic in a way, because of the sacrifice.” Leone found this line, a struggle to reconcile his competitiveness, was at the heart of his understanding of Senna.

Conscious of it or not, Leone shares a similar mindset with his nation’s hero—he’s also striving to become the best version of himself by extending beyond his limits, into the uncomfortable and unfamiliar. “What made me love acting, and being an actor,” he says, “is the possibility of changing myself.”

Originally Appeared on GQ