Beard Acting with Leonardo DiCaprio
Beards have been the Hollywood actor’s best friend since the era of the nickelodeon.
By R. COLIN TAIT
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio epitomizes my theory of beard acting. Put simply,
a man with a beard is deeper than a man without one.
Likewise, an actor with a beard is even deeper than a normal person with a beard. A beard says so much about a character’s age, social standing or state of mind, which is why it has been the Hollywood actor’s best friend since the era of the nickelodeon.
Take Me Seriously, Dammit!
We have known since Robin Williams won his Oscar for Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997) a beard can give an actor a certain weight: gravitas, sorrow, worldliness.
A beardless Robin Williams is silly, wacky, and someone who can’t be taken seriously. But a bearded Robin Williams… Well, a bearded Williams can emote. He cares. He projects depth.
A similar quandry faced Leonardo DiCaprio after the success of James Cameron’s epic film Titanic (1997). Sure, DiCaprio was the new heartthrob of everyone under twelve — the Robert Pattinson of his day perhaps? — but no one in Hollywood was taking him seriously.
He was the clean-shaven boy next door, People Magazine’s most “beautiful person,” certainly not what one would want to be considered when moving into one’s earnest mid-twenties acting career.
Obviously, in order to get taken seriously in Hollywood, DiCaprio needed a new strategy. He needed to look like a man. A real man, like Brad Pitt.
With the adventure-drama The Beach (Danny Boyle, 2000), Leo almost succeeded. We can detect the presence of a few stubbly patches set against the actor’s otherwise hairless body.
But in The Beach, Leo’s character wasn’t morally conflicted, so he didn’t yet need the facial hair or extra body mass. This would wait for his next role, in Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, 2002), where Leo and the beard clicked for good.
A brief sidenote before we see when Leo really embraced beard acting…
A Quick Pitt Stop
Perhaps Leo was inspired by his competing multiplex heartthrob, Brad Pitt. In Legends of the Fall (Edward Zwick, 1994), Pitt attempted something brand new — playing a character so complex he needed to be clean shaven in most scenes, but needed a beard for that extra actorly heft.
So when Pitt was the happy-go-lucky Tristan, he looked like this…
But when he’s really sad, later on in the movie, he looks like this.
See? Beard Acting!
As Legends of the Fall precedes Gangs of New York by eight years, we can only guess whether Leo’s acting decisions were influenced by Pitt. However, both actors do participate in a larger trend by incorporating beards into their everyday lives as well as their performances — if only to prove how “deep” they are in everyday life too.
In any event, with his next film, Gangs of New York, audiences finally see an entirely different Leo. Well, almost.
In Gangs of New York, Leo’s still Leo. He’s still got that annoying forelock that insists on falling in front of his eyes, but he has a beard. Who cares that he can only grow it in certain places? Clearly, this marks a new era of depth and weight for the actor.
Relying Too Much on (Terrible) Beards
This brings me to another point: actors carry their star persona with them from movie to movie. For example, we now expect to hear stories of Johnny Depp’s bizarre cocktails of real-life figures, which he mixes together to produce an entirely new character.
- For Jack Sparrow, Depp plays a gay Keith Richards.
- For Willy Wonka, he channels a gay, white Michael Jackson.
- For Alice in Wonderland’s Mad Hatter, he emulates Carol Channing.
Today, Depp’s star persona overwhelms his characters. The recipe for his performances have become cliche where they were once exciting. It’s almost gotten as bad as Nicolas Cage, who’s now so idiosyncratic that people are actually beginning to like him again.
I would say the same of Leo’s beard acting, which is even more wedded to his star persona and acting technique than any choices he makes as a performer. Leo has come to rely too much on his beard acting, to the point where it interferes with his actual performances.
The worst part of all is — DiCaprio’s beards are terrible. Clearly he can only grow it in certain places, resulting in characters that have beard flaws that are the same as the actor. Case in point, Body of Lies…
…and most recently, the neck beard, ponytail combo for The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2015).
Sometimes I even have trouble differentiating Leo’s characters from one another — as his identical beards in Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) and Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010) make me confused as to what happens when and to whom in either movie.
Because DiCaprio can only grow only a particular kind of beard (one he brought into style in the early 2000s), his characters exist in an anachronistic netherworld, neither belonging to their particular time and place, nor fully emerging from the present-day.
Where is the actor who took challenging roles without a beard, such as his Oscar nominated turn in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (Lasse Halstrom, 1994)? Name me a role DiCaprio has taken where he no longer has a beard — that’s the one for which he’ll earn his Oscar!
It’s gotten to the point where not even Martin Scorsese can say no to Leo’s beard acting, which speaks to the beards’ power over the actor, the powers-that-be and, heck, even Hollywood.
Once you get the theory of beard acting in your mind, you’ll begin to see it everywhere and question everything you see, from Tom Hardy to The Mcconaissance.
Yes, beard acting is just like Inception. Or True Detective. Kind of like a flat circle. Or something.
