How Leonardo DiCaprio Almost Lost Out on His Role in 'Titanic'
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Luckily he straightened out his priorities.
We can't imagine Titanic without Leonardo DiCaprio, but it almost moved forward without him.
In a new interview with GQ, director James Cameron shared an interesting new tidbit about the casting process of his 1997 box office hit, including a pretty serious misstep from the star himself that almost cost him the role.
First, Cameron recalled how smoothly an initial meeting with the soon-to-be lead went. "The meeting was funny, because I'm sitting in my conference room...and I look around, and all the women in the entire office are in the meeting, for some reason." Naturally, everyone wanted to meet Leo. "It was hysterical,” he said.
Charming as he was in that meeting, he apparently wasn't so easy-going when he returned a few days later. Kate Winslet, who played Rose, was already signed on for the film, and Cameron wanted the two of them to sit down and read on camera for a chemistry test. “He didn’t know he was going to test; he thought it was another meeting to meet Kate," the director explained. Cameron directed him into the next room to run some lines, but DiCaprio said, "Oh, I don't read."
DiCaprio was turned away on the spot. "I shook his hand and said, ‘Thanks for coming by,'” Cameron continued the story, but the actor stood up and said, "If I don’t read, I don’t get the part? Just like that?”
But the high-budget, high-stakes film was going to take up two years of his life. "I’m not going to f--k it up by making the wrong decision in casting, so you’re going to read, or you’re not going to get the part,'” Cameron told him.
DiCaprio sucked it up and came in to read, but Cameron said that "every ounce of his entire being [was] just so negative." That is until the camera started rolling. "Then he turned into Jack. Kate just lit up and they went into this whole thing and they played the scene. Dark clouds had opened up and a ray of sun came down and lit up Jack. I’m like, ‘All right. He’s the guy.'”
Titanic probably still would have gone on to smash box office records—it's the third highest-grossing film of all time—had DiCaprio chosen to stick to his no reading policy, but it's hard to imagine anyone else pulling off the part quite like him.
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