Leonardo DiCaprio is a gutsy, committed, risk-taking actor. I loved him as Hugh Glass in The Revenant, as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, as that undercover cop in The Departed, as Jack Dawson in Titanic, as Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries. But every now and then he chooses roles that are completely wrong for him.
It was impossible to accept Leo as J. Edgar Hoover in Clint Eastwood‘s J. Edgar — all I could see and hear was the makeup. The idea of the six-foot-tall DiCaprio playing the stringbean-sized Frank Sinatra in that misbegotten Martin Scorsese biopic about the legendary crooner was an atrocious idea. And now the latest — DiCaprio as Theodore Roosevelt in some kind of life-saga biopic, to be directed by Martin Scorsese. Can you imagine DiCaprio wearing T.R.’s bushy-bear moustache? He’ll never top Brian Keith‘s Roosevelt in John Milius‘s The Wind and the Lion (’75) so why even go there?
