TO transform himself into an aging J. Edgar Hoover, Leonardo DiCaprio sat for hours at a time while makeup artists gave him liver spots, yellow teeth and big, bulbous love handles. He spends a good chunk of Clint Eastwood’s film ‘J. Edgar’ that way, sweating and sneering in the unforgiving lighting of F.B.I. headquarters. The part also meant memorizing endless monologues that needed to be delivered with Hoover’s own breakneck cadence. Additionally Mr. DiCaprio, who typically comes accessorized with a supermodel girlfriend in real life, had to wrestle aggressively with a man and then kiss him.
Oh, and wear a dress.
Faced with a role with demands like that, most superstar actors, even those eager to catch the attention of Oscar voters, would have turned and run. Look unhandsome and unheroic? Too big a risk, even with Mr Eastwood at the wheel. But Mr DiCaprio, at least the post-‘Titanic’ one, has made a career of highly risky choices, and somehow it keeps paying off not only on the awards circuit — he has been nominated for three Academy Awards — but at the box office as well. “When I can’t immediately define the character, and there’s an element of mystery to it and still a lot to be explored, that’s when I say yes,” the 36-year-old Mr DiCaprio said in an interview last week on a patio at the Bel Air Hotel here. “I like those kinds of complicated characters. I just do.”
Hollywood typically doesn’t like that answer. The star system may have become more subtle since the days of Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart, but it’s still a system: American actors are supposed to be more steady persona, less shape shifter. “The apparatus likes to box actors up,” said Brian Grazer, a producer of ‘J. Edgar’, which is set for release on Wednesday. “Once they become successful in one role, get them into picture after picture where they can do exactly the same thing.”
Mr. Grazer added: “To resist that, you have to make very hard choices. Most people are too afraid.” It probably helps that DiCaprio has managed to retain a mystique about his personal life in the celebrity blogger era. Keeping that distance is something he works on. In an interview, for instance, he didn’t pretend to be a friend the way a lot of stars do. He likes his privacy, but this game also makes his performances more successful; people are more likely to accept him as a larger-than-life character if they don’t have a very clear idea of who he is off screen.
DiCaprio’s choices may be unusual, but he does have his own version of sticking with what works. The characters are mostly tortured, unsympathetic, larger-than-life guys created with the help of a tiny club of A-list directors, most notably Martin Scorsese. “Leonardo could make a lot of money making mechanical genre pictures, but he wants to be challenged,” Mr Eastwood said by telephone. “And it’s much more of a challenge to play someone who doesn’t have the slightest thing in common with you.” Next on Mr. DiCaprio’s docket is the title role in Baz Luhrmann’s remake of ‘The Great Gatsby’, and he’s ready to play Frank Sinatra in another Scorsese biopic. “That is in Mr Scorsese’s hands,” he said of a potential Sinatra film, pausing to pop a wedge of watermelon into his mouth and pour himself another cup of coffee. “I’m always incredibly game for anything that he decides to do.”
‘J. Edgar’ fits snugly into this canon. The best biopics offer a portrait of person, warts and all, and invite viewers to make their own judgments about him, and Mr Eastwood’s film strives to do just that. Hoover is depicted as a brilliant patriot who invented modern forensics and stopped at nothing to protect America through eight presidents and three wars. But the omnipowerful FBI director was an impediment, to put it mildly, to the civil rights movement and worked as hard to distort the truth as he did to collect it (and file it away) to secure his power.
All of that is more or less fact. The treacherous part of ‘J. Edgar’, written by Dustin Lance Black, an Oscar winner for his “Milk” screenplay, involves the gray. Was Hoover homosexual? Nobody knows for sure. He certainly had an unusually close relationship with his FBI colleague Clyde Tolson, played in the film by Armie Hammer (‘The Social Network’). Even less clear is whether Hoover liked to wear women’s clothes, but Mr Eastwood and Mr DiCaprio decided to retain Mr Black’s artful nod to the rumour. “Obviously there’s a love story here,” Mr Eastwood said. “Whether it is a gay love story or something else — well, the audience can interpret it. My intention was to show two men who really love each other, and beyond that it’s none of my business.”
Mr DiCaprio’s risk taking is cheered by the Hollywood contingent that loves serious films, raising him to the level of deity for his willingness to make the kind of drama that is an endangered species at major studios these days. But a more business-minded crowd — agents, studio chiefs — says taking on all of these biopics is a mistake. The worry is that at some point Mr DiCaprio will become uninteresting to audiences if he doesn’t pepper his road with a wider variety of roles.”
