The One Thing Leonardo DiCaprio Loves The Most About His One Battle After Another Character [Exclusive]

The fall season is typically the time of year when the studios start releasing the films they have the highest hopes will receive Oscar attention, so movie fans will be eating well for the next few months. But the movie that's already on everyone's lips, including legendary director Steven Spielberg, is Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another," the fiercely political action-thriller centered on a group of revolutionaries willing to disrupt the governmental status quo by any means necessary — yes, including righteous violence against their oppressors. 

Many are calling the film the best of the year, with /Film's Chris Evangelista noting in his 10 out of 10 review that when it comes to Anderson, "He creates challenging, adult-driven films that feel almost at odds with everything else currently at the multiplex, a fact that has become even more true as the modern Hollywood output has grown increasingly dire and uninspired." Multiple stories swirl around each other in "One Battle After Another," but at the center is Leonardo DiCaprio's stoned, aging insurgent, who was once the explosives expert known as "Ghetto Pat" of the legendary French 75 revolutionaries, but has now smoked himself into oblivion, living undercover as Bob with his now-teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) and struggling to be the father she deserves. It's undoubtedly one of the best roles DiCaprio has ever played, especially when things kick into high gear and the white supremacist group known as the Christmas Adventurers' Club starts sniffing around.

"I love projects that feel like a lot of thought was put into them, and this is, for lack of a better term, Paul's sort of magnum opus, his 'Odyssey,' his epic film on a grand scale with comedy and action and spectacle," DiCaprio told me during a recent interview. "But I love the humanity that he brought to his characters and the unpredictability and the sort of ecosystem that he created in the script with the bounty hunters and the Christmas Adventurers' Club and the French 75 and all these incredibly unique ideas."

But when it comes to his character? Leo loved playing a stoner.

When we first meet Pat/Bob, DiCaprio's character is cunning, alert, and deeply dedicated to the cause. When the film jumps ahead to his life as a single father, the man is a washed-up freedom fighter wasting his life between changing the channel, taking vape hits, and interrogating his daughter about who she hangs out with. "I just love the fact that my character is too stoned to remember the code to get his daughter back, and then that takes over the entire narrative," DiCaprio revealed. "Everything is completely unsuspecting. It's as if he sets up this grand espionage thriller, but I can't get over the first hurdle."

In any other movie under similar circumstances, a character like Bob would be a wish-fulfillment male power fantasy action figure, not unlike the guys Liam Neeson spent most of the 2010s playing. He'd be a one-man machine on the mission to save his daughter. But because Paul Thomas Anderson has a masterful grasp on comedy, he elects to take the character on a far more interesting journey. "One Battle After Another" would be an hour-long movie if Pat/Bob had the same capabilities, support, know-how, and skill that he had in his younger years, but because he's fried his memory from years of greening out, he has to rely on the help of those around him, including Benicio Del Toro's Sensei Sergio St. Carlos. That unique relationship was also a draw for DiCaprio to the project, who was floored by all of the unique and original ideas Anderson had woven into the story.

"I knew it was special from the beginning," said DiCaprio. You can hear our full conversation on next week's episode of the /Film Weekly podcast.

"One Battle After Another" is in theaters everywhere on September 26, 2025.