On Instagram, you will find a video of Leonardo DiCaprio inside of Regal Union Square set to B.o.B’s “Out of my Mind” featuring Nicki Minaj. This audio is typically reserved for women showing off their haircuts (“bobs”), so why is DiCaprio doing it? Well, his character’s name in One Battle After Another is Bob Ferguson, and he has a movie to promote and audio trends on which to jump aboard. There’s no upper echelon in Hollywood now — even Leo is making Reels.
DiCaprio, who appears surprisingly bemused, has also willingly appeared in TikToks, on late-night shows, sat down for podcasts, and lent his image to Fortnite. You know who else is in Fortnite? Sabrina Carpenter. They are making Leonardo DiCaprio do a Sabrina Carpenter–style press tour for One Battle After Another — and it kind of seems to be working.
Despite what DiCaprio says to the brothers Kelce on New Heights — this is not his first time doing a podcast. He drank the proto-new-media circuit Kool-Aid for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood by appearing on WTF With Marc Maron with buddy and co-star Brad Pitt (who would go on to win a long-overdue Oscar for the film). On Maron’s show, DiCaprio mostly kept to himself — a tricky thing to do on a podcast — letting Pitt run the charm offensive. He has no such barrier for One Battle After Another, politely fielding questions from the Kelce brothers about whether or not he got “Tased for real” in the movie (no) and going on to explain that being an actor is like if you had to play football with a different team for a different coach every Sunday.
Part of what feels so surreal about seeing DiCaprio do all these bits and bobs (compared to co-stars Teyana Taylor and Regina Hall and newcomer Chase Infiniti, the cast’s true zoomer, who all seem more than comfortable doing little videos or longer podcasts) is that the new normal for press tours relies on a certain kind of relatability. DiCaprio may be preternaturally talented, funny, and endlessly compelling as a big-screen presence, but he has not really banked on relatability ever, let alone this late into his career. On New Heights, he discusses realizing as a child that acting could be a real job — that he wouldn’t have to become “an accountant or a travel agent.” That those are his frames of reference for “real” jobs has a distinctly Hollywood feel whether he realizes it or not; these are positions that he interfaces with in order to get from yacht to yacht.
The last time DiCaprio graced the big screen was for Martin Scorsese’s brutal epic Killers of the Flower Moon, a film in which he played a corrupt husband slowly poisoning his Osage wife (Lily Gladstone) in order to inherit her land and access to oil. Like in One Battle After Another, DiCaprio played buffoonish and vaguely incompetent, but Scorsese doesn’t weaponize his ignorance for laughs. For Killers of the Flower Moon, DiCaprio took a backseat to Gladstone’s moment in the spotlight (she won Best Actress at the Golden Globes), but the heavy nature of that film rendered the notion of using a trending sound on TikTok inappropriate. One Battle After Another is quite serious at times, but DiCaprio’s central clownishness makes him fair game for the most lightweight promo material imaginable.
