Leonardo DiCaprio to take Hiatus from Acting

All-round magician of the screen Leonardo DiCaprio will soon be embarking on an extended hiatus from the world of film acting, or so he has said in an interview with a German publication. The 38-year-old star has never been more respected and admired than he is right at this moment, which begs the question – why now?

Well, apparently he’s tired. And to be honest, that seems fair enough. The man has been appearing on a screen of some sort since he was sixteen, and has averaged approximately a film a year ever since. Three of those films were crammed into the last two years, and his roles weren’t exactly what you’d call ‘do-nothing’. He played slimy slave owner Calvin Candie in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, and got a Golden Globe nomination for his trouble (he was snubbed for this year’s Oscars). He also stars as Jay Gatsby in what looks to be one of the biggest summer blockbusters of 2013, The Great Gatsby, and takes the leading role in Martin Scorsese’s next flick The Wolf of Wall Street, also to be released this year. We suppose it’s only natural that he’d want to put his famous feet up for a while.

In German publication Bild, DiCaprio was quoted as saying:

“I am a bit drained. I’m now going to take a long, long break. I’ve done three films in two years and I’m just worn out…I would like to improve the world a bit. I will fly around the world doing good for the environment.”

Ok, so we’ll allow him to be a bit knackered and wanting to concentrate on his environmental work and philanthropy (which he does more than a fair bit of – he donated $1 million to the Haiti relief effort, for example), but we’re still pretty bummed out about all this. In the last five years or so DiCaprio has been emerging as one of the greatest actors of our time. All the way from a frozen corpse at the bottom of the Atlantic to a gradually bloating one in the drawing room of a Texas mansion, DiCaprio holds our attention onscreen like hardly any other actor alive (possibly leaving aside Daniel Day Lewis).

We’ll permit him his ‘hiatus’ – just as long as he comes back with a vengeance as soon as possible. Imagine all the films that would suffer if he didn’t.