What does it take to win an Oscar? For Leonardo DiCaprio, it may just be sleeping in an animal carcass. His latest turn in the grizzly hellscape that is Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant may have, according to prognosticators near and far, finally broken DiCaprio’s Oscar curse. “I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do,” the actor has said. “Whether it’s going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set. [I was] enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly.” While DiCaprio-philes brace for his potential first Academy Award, here are five things you probably never knew about the most prolific Citi Bike canoodler of all time.
1. The story goes that DiCaprio got his name because his mother felt his first kick while she was looking at a Da Vinci painting. But it presented a bit of a stumbling block when he first tried to enter show business. When DiCaprio was just starting out, an agent tried to persuade him to change his name to—wait for it—Lenny Williams. (His middle name is Wilhelm, hence the made-up surname.) “They felt my name was too ethnic and I wouldn’t get as many jobs,” DiCaprio once said. “So that thwarted me from being an actor for a number of years. I tried again two years later when I was 13 and got an agent to accept me with my name.”
2. Even though DiCaprio’s early work was celebrated (his role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape earned him his first Oscar nomination when he was just 19 years old), Sony reportedly did not want him for the part of the hubristic gunslinger in 1995’s The Quick and the Dead. But his costar, Sharon Stone, believed so strongly that he was right for the role that she allegedly gave a portion of her salary to DiCaprio to ensure that he’d do the film. “He’s so good, it’s scary,” Stone told Entertainment Weekly in 1995. “I was dying to have him be in this movie. I would have carried the boy on my back to the set every day if that’s what it would have taken. Luckily, Leonardo is down-to-earth and walked by himself.”
3. For tweens of the late ’90s, DiCaprio has never outdone—and will never outdo—his portrayal of Jack Dawson in 1997’s Titanic. (Not like there needs to be evidence to support this, but in 1998, more than 200 fans petitioned when he was snubbed for the Oscar that year.) Despite our inability to let go, as it happened, DiCaprio originally passed on the role. “His character doesn’t go through torment, and Leo previously and subsequently in his career was always looking for that dark cloud,” director James Cameron told People. “It became my job to convince him that it was a challenge to do what Gregory Peck and Jimmy Stewart did in previous generations, to stand there and be strong and hold the audience’s eye without seeming to do very much. Only when I convinced him that was actually the harder thing to do that he got excited.”
4. After he played the eccentric business tycoon Howard Hughes in 2004’s The Aviator—which earned him his second Oscar nod—the role awakened DiCaprio’s own latent obsessive-compulsive disorder. “I had the thing where I would walk to school and have to walk, you know, go back a block because I didn’t step on a crack. And I felt like something was going to go wrong if I didn’t do that. And I wanted to sort of reawaken that throughout the course of the film,” he told Katie Couric in 2004. “So sometimes, you know, it would take me a while to get to set. And I would have to be doing things in my trailer. And it literally drove me nuts a lot of the time. And it lasted for a couple months after filming and still is—there’s trails of it here and there.”
5. DiCaprio’s financial portfolio is almost as impressive as his acting résumé. A committed environmentalist, he gave $3 million to help save the tigers in Nepal in 2013, and another $3 million to ocean conservation the following year. He also owns the popular fair-trade coffee company La Colombe. This year, DiCaprio (along with friends Tobey Maguire and Adam Levine) invested $55 million in the “perfect mattress” company, Casper. And don’t even get us started on the lavish gifts he has purchased for his mother.
