'It didn’t go too well': Leonardo DiCaprio once blamed 'pretty atrocious voice' for losing out on Baz Luhrmann hit
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: A character actor at the core, there are very few acting tasks that ‘Titanic’ star Leonardo DiCaprio cannot do! However, even the greatest of Leonardo DiCaprio’s fans don’t exactly remember him as a musical genius. By his own admission, the actor has an “atrocious” voice that once cost him a movie! That too not any movie but Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Moulin Rouge’.
As it turns out, ‘The Wolf of the Wall Street’ star was initially considered for the musical ‘Moulin Rouge’. The ‘Romeo + Juliet’ actor-director duo even met once to converse about the movie. As DiCaprio once recounted to Variety, “To be honest, I’m not really prepared to do a musical, simply because I think I have a pretty atrocious voice.”
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“But we had a friendly thing where it was me and him and a piano player, and we tried to sing a song together. It didn’t go too well. I think it was ‘Lean on Me,’ and when I hit the high note, he just turned to me,” recalled the star who would thankfully reunite with the director again in ‘The Great Gatsby’. Luhrmann, who understood the megastar would not be a perfect fit for the role, then said, “‘Yes, D, I don’t know if this conversation should continue,” and the role eventually went to Ewan McGregor.
The 2001 Buz Luhrmann directorial ‘Moulin Rouge’ is a romantic musical drama featuring a young English poet called Christian (played by McGregor) who falls in love with ‘Moulin Rouge’ star, cabaret actress, and courtesan Satine.
‘I wasn’t hired for my voice for this movie’
Despite his self-admission about having an “atrocious” voice, DiCaprio sang once in one of his movies. And guess what? He had fun while doing so. Talented filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, in fact, specifically gave DiCaprio a singing role in his 2019 film ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood'.
The footage from the movie includes DiCaprio's character Rick Dalton's singing and making merry in the bygone era’s style in the show ‘Hullabaloo’. Speaking once of the assignment, the ‘Django Unchained’ once hilariously said, “Well, thank god I wasn’t hired for my voice for this movie.”
The talented actor added, “We had a couple of different songs that we tried. One was ‘Green Door’ and the other one was ‘Don’t Fence Me In’. And we ended up using ‘Green Door’.” However, his lack of talent in the musical department, in fact, fulfilled the requirement of the role as it was befitting for Dalton to have a bad voice, as DiCaprio explained, “But, you know, it was great. It was a lot of fun and Rick Dalton isn’t sort of hired either for his acting talent for most jobs and most certainly not his singing voice. And this is a good display of that,” reports Entertainment Weekly.
You can judge for yourself whether the 'The Great Gatsby' actor is a good singer or not.
Did DiCaprio just sing at Oscars 2020?
As it turns out to be, in the following year only, DiCaprio indeed sang once again! During the 2020 Oscars, he, along with Brad Pitt and other stars, was spotted singing along with Janelle Monae. However, as one may have guessed, DiCaprio was pretty uninterested when Monae tried to give him the mic for a note.