Leonardo DiCaprio: Swimming with sharks and back in deep water with Kate Winslet

How do you get Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the world's most enigmatic stars, to reveal his secrets? Take him shark diving...

Leonardo Dicaprio is wearing a hooded wetsuit that almost conceals his good looks, but there’s no mistaking the glint in his cobalt-blue eyes. He is ‘stoked’.

We’re in the middle of Shark Alley, South Africa, and Mike Rutzen, our great white shark-safari guide, has just shown us the flimsy looking cage on the side of his 12.5-metre boat, Barracuda, where we’ll be getting up close with the fiercest predator on Earth.

Scroll down to watch the trailer to Revolutionary Road...

'There is no plan B. I love acting and I still have a desire to make great movies and put in some great performances,' says Leonardo DiCaprio

The water is choppy and one of DiCaprio’s friends is lying on deck suffering from seasickness. DiCaprio, meanwhile, can’t wait to get into the water. Waterproof camera in hand, he puts on his mask and slides into the cage, grinning wildly despite the cold.
He’s an experienced scuba diver, totally at ease in this environment. As Rutzen throws foul-smelling bait, known as chum, into the water he tells us that the sharks’ keen sense of smell will draw them from as far as five miles away.
Within moments he spots a massive shadow gliding through the water and shouts a warning. We all take a gulp of air and submerge beneath the surface, staring through the bars into the gloomy depths. Visibility is only about five feet.
Suddenly, a huge shark comes out of nowhere and lunges for bait that’s hanging just a few feet from DiCaprio’s face. He coolly snaps a picture as the shark grazes the side of the cage, rocking it slightly.
Before long we’re surrounded by a dozen hungry great whites. It’s terrifying and compelling at the same time. DiCaprio is grinning and snapping photographs, willing the sharks to come closer. He stays in the water long after the cold has defeated the rest of us but is equally affected once we’re back on the boat.
‘Wow. That was amazing,’ he says.

His pupils are dilated with adrenaline and he mocks one of his friends who’s chatting instead of admiring the scenery.
‘Look around you!’ he screams, pointing to thousands of basking seals, ‘You’re missing a scene out of National Geographic.’

I’d arranged the trip to Shark Alley – a deep channel between the Pacific and Atlantic that contains the highest concentration of great white sharks on the planet – after one of DiCaprio’s friends told me about his fascination with sharks. I’d hoped it would lead to an interview, but he politely refused my request.
Indeed, DiCaprio is probably one of the most seen but least known celebrities on
the planet. He rarely talks to journalists and remains something of an enigma, despite countless photographs of him clubbing with supermodels. He’s been out with Kate Moss, Helena Christensen, Amber Valletta and Eva Herzigova, and for several years dated Giselle Bündchen. He’s currently dating Israeli model Bar Refaeli.
He also has a gang of friends who seem to act as a firewall against unwanted advances, although like many stars he’s had his fingers burnt on a few occasions.
Dana Giacchetto turned out to be a crooked financial adviser, who fleeced DiCaprio out of thousands and ended up in jail. When David Blaine, the magician, was bold enough to publicly ridicule Leo, their friendship swiftly ended.
In person, DiCaprio is charmingly polite.
At our next meeting some time later, he’s very business-like – before smiling and giving me a warm hug.
‘We’re finally getting to that interview,’ he laughs.
Today DiCaprio is promoting his latest film, Revolutionary Road, in which he is reunited with Kate Winslet for the first time since 1997’s Titanic.
In fact, this is his only UK interview for Revolutionary Road. He’s looking trim and professional, dressed in black from head to foot – smart shirt, suit trousers and shiny shoes. At 34, he looks older, more grown up. 

I battle with self-doubt. We all do

Revolutionary Road is a portrayal of the disintegration of a marriage, set against the stultifying conformity of Fifties American suburbia. Couldn’t he and Winslet have chosen something more romantic for their collaborative comeback? Leonardo Dicaprio laughs.
‘Kate and I had to find something completely different or else it would be a set-up for disaster.’
Frank Wheeler is probably DiCaprio’s least likeable character: he’s smarmy and self-important, weak and deluded. He casually cheats on his wife and lies to himself. Even so, DiCaprio makes you feel for him.
‘Frank is unheroic and cowardly and it was fun to play someone like that. Ultimately I had great sympathy for him. He’s like a puppy that wants to be told he’s doing a good job.
'He’s trying to provide for his family, fulfil the things his father never did… he’s just doing the best he can in his circumstances. I think that’s true of a lot of men – we just want to be told we’re doing a good job.
‘The Fifties was America’s pre-pubescence, in the sense that we were just developing our moral high ground. People were getting white picket fences and trying to find an iconic American image.
'As alien as the Fifties seem to us now, we’re all still holding on to a lot of that, that picture-perfect image.’
Has this movie put him off marriage altogether?
‘Not at all,’ he says, side-stepping the question.
‘This is about two people who should never have been together in the first place. It’s inevitably doomed. It’s a fascinating train wreck to watch. Frank is constantly battling with self-doubt, as we all do.’
Even you?
‘Of course. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t.’

There’s an assurance about Leonardo DiCaprio that belies his own back-story: an only child from a broken marriage growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, thrust into mega-stardom when he was barely into his twenties. He should have been a train wreck himself, but he seems to have eluded the cliché his life could so easily have become.
He attributes it to his parents who, he says, never allowed their personal issues to affect their only son.
‘I have a great relationship with both my parents and when I told them at 11 years old that I had decided I wanted to be an actor they were always totally supportive.’
His father, George, a German-Italian artist, has steered DiCaprio creatively throughout his career.
‘I would never have done the story about a gay poet named Arthur Rimbaud, for example, if it hadn’t been for my father,’ says DiCaprio.
His mother, Irmelin, from whom DiCaprio inherited his slanting blue eyes, is also a big influence.
‘I can tell her everything,’ he admits.
She runs his environmental foundation and, one suspects, keeps him grounded in reality.
Acting was an ambition from an early age.
‘Part of it was wanting to escape my environment but it took me a while to realise you could make a career out of it. I thought actors were this elite club of people you could never join. But when I learned from my stepbrother (actor Adam Farrar) that you could actually do this for a living, I became pretty persistent.

I had no idea what Titanic had unleashed

‘When I was 16, I got a role with Robert De Niro and Ellen Barkin in This Boy’s Life, and I knew I’d hit the lottery and that I’d better respect it.
'Success is not something to be flippant about because it can easily go away. It is so much about timing. I know how difficult it is to be a working actor, let alone being in a position to choose the projects you want to do.’
Asked if he has a secret fallback, he says: ‘If I was unable to act commercially, I would start doing movies with my friends for no money.
'There is no Plan B. I love acting and I still have a desire to make great movies and to put in some great performances. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I don’t think that desire will ever leave me.’
He admits that he was completely caught unawares by the success of Titanic.
‘It was never my intention to have my image shown around the world,’ he says.
Or to see barbers in Afghanistan arrested as they enraged the Taliban by offering a Leo DiCaprio-style haircut labelled The Titanic. At an airport in Paris, a teenager grabbed his leg and pressed her head into it. He tried to tell her that if she let go he’d talk to her, but she wouldn’t loosen her grip.
But it was in Tokyo that DiCaprio was to fully experience the reality of his new-found superstardom. Despite advice to the contrary, he reached into a melée of teenage girls to accept a bunch of flowers. They hauled him into the crowd and began pulling off his clothes before his bodyguards could rescue him.
I ask if it was frightening.
‘I wasn’t scared because it was these little girls, although there were a lot of them,’ he grins. ‘But it was weird because I really had no idea what had been unleashed. It was like being hit head-on by a truck. People kept saying to me, “This film is really successful, Leo. This is one of… in fact, this is the most successful movie of all time.”
'But I still wasn’t getting it. It wasn’t until Japan that I realised that this movie had had this insane impact. At that point, all I knew was that I had to take a break from it.’
Post-Titanic, his fee leapt from $1 million to $10 million but he refused every blockbuster he was offered, famously passing on Spider-Man, which turned his childhood friend Tobey Maguire into a mega-star.
It turns out the break from film-making provided DiCaprio with the impetus to pursue his other great passion: the environment.

DiCaprio with Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road

‘Since I was a kid I’ve been passionate about different species being pushed into extinction and that propelled me to request a meeting with Al Gore in the White House. He said to me, “There’s this thing called global warming and it’s going to come to fruition in a horrific way in our future so if you’re going to get behind any issue, this is the one to get behind.”’
Since then, DiCaprio has become the most vocal and committed of Hollywood eco-activists. In 2000, he gave an impassioned speech challenging the incoming President Bush to pay attention to the issue.
And last year he premiered his full-length documentary feature on the state of the planet, 11th Hour, at the Cannes Film Festival. It had a mixed reception and DiCaprio was criticised for the perceived opulence of his jet-set lifestyle.
‘Just to clarify,’ he says. ‘I flew commercial.’
Despite his environmental campaigning, DiCaprio insists he is not the Hollywood poster child for all things green.
‘This is not about me,’ he says. ‘And it’s not about one group of people telling any other group of people how to live. I don’t think it’s fair to tell people to install solar panels, buy (low-watt) light bulbs or drive a hybrid – that’s not a reality for most people.
'It is about something much, much bigger. It’s about getting the governments of the world to implement environmental policy.
'We are the most powerful country in the world and we haven’t made a tiptoe towards renewable technologies. We should be the ones paving the way, the ones other countries look up to. It makes me extremely sad.
‘I was in Rome when Obama won the election. He represents a whole new era. Obama gets it that green technology and the economy go hand in hand, that we can build an industry that will create new jobs and economic growth and make us less reliant on foreign oil.’
He’s recently traded in his Toyota Prius hybrid car for a £100,000 Tesla, the first high-performance electric car.
‘It’s my first sports car and it’s an unbelievable drive,’ he enthuses. ‘It’s scarily fast and it all happens with the flip of a switch, unlike a piston-driven engine that needs to build up momentum.’
Revolutionary Road marks another phase in his career, as it’s the first time he has played a husband and father – roles he’s not so keen to experience in real life just yet.
He constantly sidesteps questions about ‘settling down’ or personal topics and confesses his life is not easy on relationships.
‘It’s a weird industry because you go off on these locations for four, five, six months and have to put everything on hold.
'Life does not happen while you are working and you can’t hone your relationships back home at the same time. Then you come back and have to catch up with everything.’
His publicist is making gestures that the interview is over, but I have one more question: does he ever feel trapped by celebrity?
‘I have absolutely nothing to complain about,’ he says.
‘I just got really, really lucky.’

‘Revolutionary Road’ is released on January 30