Leonardo DiCaprio Says He Feels ‘Emotionally’ in His 30s as He Reflects on Turning 50

The actor also said that turning 50 “creates a feeling like you have a desire to just be more honest and not waste your time”

Leonardo DiCaprio for Esquire. 

In an interview with his One Battle After Another director Paul Thomas Anderson for Esquire‘s Mavericks of Hollywood issue, the filmmaker asked DiCaprio to answer, “as quickly as” he could, “If you didn’t know how old you are, how old are you right now?” “Thirty-two,” the actor responded.

DiCaprio later reflected on his milestone 50th birthday while admitting that he felt more like he turned “emotionally 35.”

Asked whether turning 50 last year has made him reflect on his life, DiCaprio said, “Well, it creates a feeling like you have a desire to just be more honest and not waste your time.”

“I can only imagine how the next few decades are going to progress,” he added.

Leonardo DiCaprio for Esquire.

DiCaprio said he looks to his mom Irmelin as an “example,” noting how “she just says exactly what she thinks and wastes no time. She spends no time trying to fake it.”

For the Academy Award winner, this includes “being more upfront and risking having things fall apart or risk the disagreements or risk going your separate ways from any type of relationship in life — the personal, professional.”

“It’s that you just don’t want to waste your time anymore,” he added.

DiCaprio has certainly had his fair share of experience in Hollywood, beginning with television roles in the late 1980s and eventually hitting it big with 1993’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, which nabbed him his first Oscar nomination at age 19.

He went on to be nominated six more times, and has won once: in the Best Actor category, for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s 2015 Western epic The Revenant.

Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover of Esquire.

As for whether he watches his movies regularly, DiCaprio told Anderson, 55, for Esquire that he “rarely” does, but “there’s one that I have watched more than others”: 2004’s The Aviator.

“That’s simply because it was such a special moment to me,” he said of the biopgraphical drama, for which he was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar.

“I had worked with Marty [Scorsese] on Gangs of New York, and I’d been toting around a book on Howard Hughes for 10 years.

I almost did it with Michael Mann, but there was a conflict and I ended up bringing it to Marty.”

“I was 30. It was the first time as an actor I got to feel implicitly part of the production, rather than just an actor hired to play a role,” DiCaprio continued.

“I felt responsible in a whole new way.”

He added, “I’ve always felt proud and connected to that film as such a key part of my growing up in this industry and taking on a role of a real collaborator for the first time.”