15 Years Ago, 'The Aviator' Transformed Leonardo DiCaprio's Career – And Forever Changed Our Perception Of Him As An Actor

By now, of course, DiCaprio working with Scorsese has become one of the most well-appreciated director/actor collaborations in decades. Since the start of the 21st century, DiCaprio has appeared in five of Scorsese's films, including Gangs of New York and The Wolf of Wall Street. (Robert de Niro has, with The Irishman, now starred in nine Scorsese films.) Yet the star's shift into the serious roles that now define him only fully came into being with his role as Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Up to that point, DiCaprio had been both blessed and cursed with the kind of cherubic face that turned him into a teenage heartthrob for the back half of the 1990s. His roles in Titanic and The Man in the Iron Mask were well-liked (and Titanic was...y'know, Titanic), but also didn't automatically hint at a more mature talent waiting to break out. Perhaps intentionally, it was around the time of those two films that DiCaprio became both impossible to avoid in the public eye and much more careful to choose his projects. (DiCaprio has, excluding documentaries and a short film, appeared in 28 films over three decades. 12 of those 28 films were released in the 1990s.)The same year that DiCaprio co-starred in Gangs of New York, he played the lead in Steven Spielberg's breezy period comedy Catch Me If You Can, as real-life con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr.. Frank was a young man who was able to use his boyish good looks to fool people into thinking he was both younger and older than he really was. In the film, we see Frank act like a substitute teacher, a commercial pilot, a lawyer, and a doctor, all while barely being old enough to drive. DiCaprio is quite charming in Catch Me If You Can, in what could almost read as a meta-commentary on the frustration of having to play older men while never looking like he could actually embody them from the inside out.

When you glance at the titles in Leonardo DiCaprio's filmography both before and after The Aviator, it's fascinating to see the shift. His roles became more careful, if not always automatically successful. (There aren't a lot of fierce defenders of either Blood Diamond or Body of Lies, which is appropriate because neither of them are very good films. But in both cases, DiCaprio was working with well-known filmmakers; it's easy to see why he signed onto a Ridley Scott project, if only for the director's reputation.) DiCaprio has managed to thread a needle that basically no other actor can do these days: he's a choosy actor who works only with a select few filmmakers, on films that typically do very well at the box office and only add to the legacy he's building.That point about the box office is kind of remarkable to consider: in this decade, DiCaprio's starred in just eight films, and only one of them grossed less than $100 million domestically. That would be the 2011 Clint Eastwood film J. Edgar, where DiCaprio attempted to play controversial FBI leader J. Edgar Hoover. (That, too, is a film with few defenders because that, too, is a bad film. It's also a rare bad performance from DiCaprio.) The Aviator isn't one of DiCaprio's biggest hits but it also crossed the century mark at the box office with $102 million domestically. Though he's not going to be seen in a Marvel Cinematic Universe title anytime soon, Leonardo DiCaprio is as close to a sure thing among his fellow actors at the box office.The Aviator also served as the first time DiCaprio was nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars. It took him until 2015 to win that award for The Revenant, which frankly feels like the Academy awarding him simply because they forgot to do so with his past work. Where Gangs of New York was akin to watching a boy attempt to dress up in his father's clothes, play-acting at being an adult, The Aviator marked the first time when DiCaprio's ability to communicate experience and age shone through.

And it all arguably started 15 years ago with the release of The Aviator, a film that could have easily been a victim of period-piece boredom or unintentional comedy. The ways in which Scorsese and DiCaprio depict the OCD plaguing Howard Hughes could have inspired derisive laughter, specifically the way that Hughes constantly repeats the same phrase or word when stuck in a verbal rut. But instead, it's just as haunting in the closing scene when Hughes is trying to talk up the successful launch of the Spruce Goose (or, as he would rather call it, the H-4 Hercules) when he gets stuck on the phrase "the way of the future". Scorsese sharply cutting to black as Hughes keeps repeating that phrase, and not giving away anything else about Hughes' life afterwards (there was a lot more of the "holing up in a screening room" and a lot less "hooking up with Hollywood starlets" in his future) is enough of a reminder that the eponymous Hughes of the title had a grim life ahead. There's no photo of Hughes to show us who the real man was; there's just DiCaprio. The actor embodies Hughes in these horrific moments as much as when he's adopting the slick style of a movie magnate. Leonardo DiCaprio is now widely accepted as one of the few remaining modern movie stars, a status that was far from certain 15 years ago. He'd stopped making quite as many movies, but a film like The Aviator could have sunk his prospects had it failed to coalesce. It's not just that Martin Scorsese is a brilliant filmmaker capable of highlighting the inside-baseball elements of Old Hollywood. It's that he saw something in Leonardo DiCaprio that hadn't been made apparent yet in his work. He saw in DiCaprio a wealth of maturity waiting to get out, a force that's been unleashed and unstoppable in the intervening 15 years.