In all the years that press and Twitter users and Golden Globes hosts have poked fun at Leonardo DiCaprio’s penchant for dating younger women, no one stopped to ask: How old does Leonardo DiCaprio feel? The actor turned 50 in November, but in a new Esquire interview with his One Battle After Another director, Paul Thomas Anderson, DiCaprio clarifies that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s 50 at heart. “I’m going to ask you a question, and you’re going to answer as quickly as you can,” Anderson prompts. “If you didn’t know how old you are, how old are you right now?” Because it’s an interview in print with no sound component, we have no idea how long it took DiCaprio to actually answer the question. I’m going to take a stab in the dark and say he thought about this for, hmm, six seconds. DiCaprio’s answer? Thirty-two.
Okay, that’s almost making it make sense. Anderson doesn’t take it that far, but rather elides further exploration. “What you’ll have to do is investigate what happened when you were 32, and then you’re going to discover and uncover why that was your answer,” he tells DiCaprio, which feels like kindhearted, motion-picture-director shorthand for you need to go to therapy, probably. (Anderson, to his credit, says he’s 27, the same age as when he directed Boogie Nights.) When DiCaprio was 32, the year was 2008 and his two films were Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies and Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road. The latter, about a husband drowning in the malaise of suburban life, can’t exactly be a great place for DiCaprio to want to hang out in spiritually, but maybe it helps him connect with a younger generation, like, say, his 26-year-old girlfriend, Vittoria Ceretti. Later in the conversation, when Anderson broaches DiCaprio’s actual age, the actor compares turning 50 to turning 35. For many of us who are, say, 34 and a half, the opposite feels way more true. Still, it’s much easier to square away the ongoing age gaps in his relationship once you consider this is a man who thinks of himself as being born in 1993.
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