Why Leonardo DiCaprio Turned Down Anakin Skywalker
December 30, 2015
Leonardo DiCaprio (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Leonardo DiCaprio came within podracing distance of playing Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode II and III. In a recent interview with UK magazine Shortlist, the Revenant star revealed that George Lucas offered him the role of soon-to-be-Darth-Vader (ultimately played in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith by Hayden Christensen). At the time Lucas was casting his anti-hero, DiCaprio was just a few years past Titanic — and judging from the interview, he simply wasn’t interested in making another big-budget blockbuster.
“[I] just didn’t feel ready to take that dive. At that point,” DiCaprio said of the Star Wars prequel role, after confirming that he met with George Lucas and turned it down.
Related: What That Gruesome, Gory ‘Revenant’ Scene Has in Common With ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ (Spoilers)
As Vanity Fair points out, the search for the teenage Anakin Skywalker was massive. (Nine-year-old Jake Lloyd played him as a boy in The Phantom Menace.) Casting director Robin Gurland told StarWars.com that she considered 1,500 candidates, and according to EW, those included everyone from DiCaprio to Dawson Creek stars James Van Der Beek and Joshua Jackson. Paul Walker was briefly rumored to be a frontrunner, as was General Hospital’s Jonathan Jackson. Ryan Phillippe has spoken
about auditioning with the prequel’s Queen Amidala, Natalie Portman. Of
all the names floated in the press, DiCaprio was by far the biggest
star at the time.
However, DiCaprio went in a different direction. Uneasy with his new status as an international heartthrob, the Titanic star rejected multiple crowd-pleasing roles, including the lead in Spider-Man, which went to his friend Tobey Maguire. (“I didn’t feel ready to put on that suit yet,” he told Vanity Fair.) Instead, he made The Beach with director Danny Boyle, the historical adventure The Man in the Iron Mask — and, around the same time Attack of the Clones was shooting, Gangs of New York, DiCaprio’s
first movie with director Martin Scorsese. The actor would go on to
collaborate with Scorsese on a streak of successful and award-winning
films, including The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, and The Wolf of Wall Street. (They’ll reunite soon for an adaptation of the non-fiction bestseller The Devil in the White City.)
Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman in ‘Attack of the Clones’ (20th Century Fox/The Kobal Collection)
As
for the actor who took the role of Anakin, his career didn’t have quite
so positive a trajectory. Hayden Christensen was a 19-year-old unknown
when he starred in Attack of the Clones, and his sulky performance was widely derided by critics and fans. Despite subsequent box office success with the sci-fi film Jumper and critical praise for the drama Shattered Glass, Christensen ended up quitting Hollywood for years. And he blames Star Wars. “I felt like I had this great thing in Star Wars that provided all these opportunities and gave me a career, but it all kind of felt a little too handed to me,” he told the LA Times
this week. “I didn’t want to go through life feeling like I was just
riding a wave.” We’ll never know if Leonardo-as-Anakin (Lanikan?
DiCaprikan?) would have fared better.
Watch the 'Force Awakens’ cast demonstrate how to play with their action figures:
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