For decades, Hollywood has wondered who would get the license to kill. However, one name has stayed out of the conversation, not because the actor isn’t talented, but because of a “really upsetting dream.”
Before the Oscar buzz that briefly put Leonardo DiCaprio in the mix for James Bond, the ‘Titanic‘ star talked about a strange mental block that made him pull away from the role. While other actors fight for the tuxedo, DiCaprio spent his early career waking up in a sweat just from the idea of playing 007.
The Upsetting Dream That Scared DiCaprio Away from Bond
In a 1995 interview, a young DiCaprio, who was then an Oscar nominee still living with his mother, described a nightmare that kept coming back. The dream was weird and scary for him. “I had a dream that I was hired to star in a video game version of a James Bond movie,” DiCaprio said.
In the dream, he broke into the White House to steal government secrets, but the mission went wrong in a way that even Q couldn’t fix. To get away, DiCaprio turned into a baby. And then it got worse. In the nightmare, he literally ran into the actual James Bond of that time, Pierce Brosnan. The smooth Irish actor looked at the frightened American and gave him a brutal one-word review of his performance: “Cheesy.”
For an actor who takes his work as seriously as DiCaprio, being called cheesy by 007 himself was a nightmare. “That was a really upsetting dream,” he later told Far Out Magazine. “It kinda shows how it is hard to deal with all this bullshit.”
Why DiCaprio Still Won’t Play Bond Even After All These Years
Fans often think DiCaprio avoids Bond because the character is usually British or because he likes darker roles. But the real reason is stranger. He has always seen action movies as too formulaic. In that same interview from thirty years ago, he complained that action scripts felt unoriginal. He said producers would often suggest changes like, “Well, he has a Black wife! How different can you get?”
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Still, the dream hasn’t made him hate Bond. In a 2009 interview, he said he was a fan of the series and was even planning a movie about Bond creator Ian Fleming. Interestingly, around the time he won his Oscar for ‘The Revenant‘ in 2016, rumors popped up that producers had offered him the Bond role. However, his team quickly shut those reports down.
The race for the next 007 has gotten smaller, with actor Callum Turner now seen as the frontrunner to take over for Daniel Craig. DiCaprio, on the other hand, stays focused on environmental documentaries and period films.
As one journalist put it, hopefully the 51-year-old star has stopped waking up “stricken by the fear that he was a shite James Bond inside his head.” For now, DiCaprio will stick to winning his 2nd Oscar and surviving bear attacks. He will leave the shaken martinis to someone who isn’t afraid of being called cheesy in their sleep.
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