Leonardo DiCaprio shared his take on acting in films that politically “pick a side.”
“Nowadays, it feels like there’s such polarity and extremism that if you pick a side, you’re alienating half [of the audience],” he told Jennifer Lawrence on the newest installment of Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series on Wednesday. In the interview, the two stars, who shared the screen in the Netflix film Don’t Look Up in 2021, discussed how they choose roles in our politically “polarized” society.
“I find that my creative part of my brain and the political part of my brain are intrinsically linked,” Lawrence said, “Like that’s how I’m digesting the world.”
The actress told The New York Times’ The Interview podcast in November that she “didn’t really know if I should” discuss politics publicly as a celebrity.
“The first Trump administration was so wild and just, how can we let this stand? I felt like I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off,” she said. “But as we’ve learned, election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for. So then what am I doing? I’m just sharing my opinion on something that’s going to add fuel to a fire that’s ripping the country apart. We are so divided.”
DiCaprio has been very outspoken about climate change over the years, reserving his public criticism of Donald Trump and much of his political commentary in general to that one issue (as in 2017, when he slammed Trump’s “careless” withdrawal from the Paris Agreement).
When DiCaprio endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, he again tied his support explicitly to climate change. “Climate change is killing the earth and ruining our economy. We need a bold step forward to save our economy, our planet, and ourselves,” he said in a statement at the time, “That’s why I’m voting for Kamala Harris.”
The actor explained his dilemma about bringing politics into his acting work when Lawrence asked whether he shared her view that the two are “intrinsically” linked. “No, but this was an interesting one because PTA wrote this 15 years ago, though it feels very topical,” he explained of the charged political themes in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.
“You and I did Don’t Look Up together,” he told Lawrence, citing another slight exception he made for the 2016 climate change disaster movie. “It’s very difficult to say something about the world we live in. And, it has to have an element of irony or comedy to it, otherwise people don’t feel allowed in.”
