Leonardo DiCaprio recently recalled a hilarious instance from the sets of Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 period dramedy Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, when his parents showed up on set. His co-star Brad Pitt couldn’t believe they were his parents even when DiCaprio repeatedly insisted they are.
“My stepmother is a follower of Sikhism. My father comes from the hippie counterculture, grew up in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and spent time with a lot of people from the underground art movement in Los Angeles in the ’70s,” DiCaprio said. While DiCaprio’s paternal grandparents were Italian, his father was an American underground comix artist.
Since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was set in Los Angeles of 1970s, his father George DiCaprio looked like a natural fit in the proceedings when he visited the set. “I remember that moment when we were leaving Musso & Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard, and I said to Brad Pitt, ‘This is my dad, and this is my stepmom.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ I said, ‘No, it’s them.’ He said, ‘Yeah, sure,’” DiCaprio recalled in an interview with TIME.
“I thought, ‘I know they look like extras in this movie, but it’s actually them. This is how they dress every day.’ It was an incredible moment. I’ll never forget it,” DiCaprio added, laughing. He played a fading actor in the film that starred Pitt as his stunt double. The film also starred Margot Robbie, Margaret Qualley, Austin Butler, Timothy Olyphant, and Dakota Fanning among others.
DiCaprio has had an interesting childhood influenced by multiple cultures. He was born to George DiCaprio and Irmelin Indenbirken, his German mother. His parents divorced when he was just one after his father fell in love with another woman. However, they continued to live in the same neighbourhood in order to raise Leonardo, before he and his mother moved out a few years later.
In a 2014 interview with The Los Angeles Times, DiCaprio revealed he grew up in a neighbourhood that looked like Martin Scorsese’s 1976 seminal crime drama Taxi Driver “in a lot of ways,” in the sense that there was a “major prostitution ring on my street corner, crime and violence everywhere” and “people smoking crack and shooting heroin”.
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Since DiCaprio hated attending public school, he’d beg his mother to take him for auditions for a child actor’s role instead. Years later, when he ironically played a rags-to-riches man in Scorsese’s 2013 blockbuster crime drama The Wolf of Wall Street, it took him back to his childhood days in that neighbourhood. “It came from the fact that I grew up very poor and I got to see the other side of the spectrum,” he said.
