Why Leonardo DiCaprio Has Never Watched Titanic

A lot of actors hate watching their own work. Adam Driver infamously walked out of an interview with NPR's Terry Gross after she played clips of his performance in "Marriage Story," and that's just a particularly dramatic example; hearing famous performers say they can barely stand watching themselves on-screen feels incredibly common at this point. That's why, ultimately, none of us should be all that surprised that Leonardo DiCaprio hasn't revisited "Titanic" in years.

During an "Actors on Actors" chat with Variety that paired DiCaprio with fellow Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence — with whom he co-starred in Adam McKay's 2021 satire "Don't Look Up" — Lawrence, who starred in the dark motherhood drama "Die My Love" this year, asked DiCaprio if he's rewatched "Titanic" at all recently. "No. I haven't seen it before," DiCaprio admitted. Lawrence, of course, had a characteristically funny response: "Oh, you should. I bet you could watch it now, it's so good." 

DiCaprio said that he doesn't really watch any of his movies and asked Lawrence if she did, getting another classic Lawrence answer out of her: "No. I've never made something like 'Titanic,' if I did I would watch it. Once I was really drunk, I put on 'American Hustle.' I was like, 'I wonder if I'm good at acting?' I put it on, and I don't remember what the answer is." The Lawrence of it all aside, she's right; "Titanic" is good, actually, and DiCaprio is good in it if he can bring himself to watch it again.

As a quick reminder, writer-director James Cameron's historical epic stars DiCaprio as Jack Dawson, a young starry-eyed man who meets and falls for the wealthy Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) while they're both aboard the doomed Titanic. Apparently, DiCaprio almost lost the role to boot.

In a GQ career retrospective before the 2022 release of "Avatar: The Way of Water," James Cameron was quite transparent about the fact that, while Leonardo DiCaprio was absolutely perfect for the role of Jack Dawson, he did not make it easy for the director to keep him around or even hire him in the first place. As Cameron tells it, the first issue was that DiCaprio nailed his audition but then didn't want to read with Kate Winslet. "He comes in and he's like every ounce of his entire being is just so negative, right up until I said action, and then he turned into Jack and Kate just lit up and they went into this whole thing and played the scene," Cameron recalled.

Then, when DiCaprio started suggesting to Cameron that Jack have some sort of traumatic backstory, Cameron had to really lay down the law. 

"I said, 'You've done all these great characters that all have a problem, whether it's addiction or whatever it is, I said you've gotta learn how to hold the center and not have all that stuff,'" Cameron said, citing screen legends like Jimmy Stewart and Gregory Peck who, as he put it, "'just f**king stood there.'" Ultimately, Cameron completely figured out how to level with DiCaprio. "Those things are easier, those are props, those are crutches, what I'm talking about is much harder and you're probably not quite ready for it,'" the filmmaker remembered saying. The second I said that, it clicked for him that this was a really hard, challenging film for him, and this was my mistake: I hadn't sufficiently laid out the challenge for him." That did it — and DiCaprio kept seeking challenges.

Since "Titanic" released in 1997, Leonardo DiCaprio's name has become synonymous with acting excellence. Though it took DiCaprio a baffling number of tries to win his first Academy Award — which he got for 2015's survival drama "The Revenant," though I'll go to my grave arguing that he actually deserved it for his bravura, bonkers performance in Martin Scorsese's 2013 comedy-drama "The Wolf of Wall Street" — he's turned in a ton of absolutely unbelievable performances over the years. The guy can play an audacious grifter ("Catch Me If You Can"), a horrendous slave owner ("Django Unchained"), a fading movie star ("Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood"), an evil dolt ("Killers of the Flower Moon"), an American literary icon (the titular role in "The Great Gatsby"), and a man desperate to find his way back to his family ("Inception"), just to name a few of his roles. For the last handful of years, though, DiCaprio has been in what I've fondly dubbed his "loser era," and frankly, he's rarely been better.

DiCaprio plays a couple of schlubs in "Don't Look Up" and "Killers of the Flower Moon," but his revolutionary turned creaky, aged stoner Bob Ferguson in Paul Thomas Anderson's modern masterpiece "One Battle After Another" is one of his best turns in years. DiCaprio is funny, heartbreaking, lived-in, and more earnest than he's been in quite some time as Bob, a man who will stop at nothing to find his missing daughter even as he struggles to function because he's so buzzed. I'm sorry James Cameron had a tough time with DiCaprio at first on "Titanic" and that DiCaprio can't watch the movie, but without it, we might never have gotten Bob Ferguson.