Leonardo DiCaprio to play another famous Leo in da Vinci biopic

August 12th 2017, 8:37pm

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Leonardo DiCaprio has mastered many areas of the acting profession, including winning an Oscar, starring in the (once) biggest movie ever, and dating countless super models. But he’s about to accomplish the greatest feat any actor can hope to achieve: playing a character with the same name as him. Not only does the character share the same name, but he’s the only “Leonardo” who’s more famous than DiCaprio.

Variety got the scoop that Paramount has officially won the movie rights to the upcoming Walter Isaacson biography about the famous painter and inventor Leonardo da Vinci, and DiCaprio is set to play the figure in the movie about his life. No details about the movie itself were announced, but DiCaprio will also produce the flick via his Appian Way banner.

Isaacson is one of the most lauded biographers of our time, having written books about Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger and Steve Jobs. One of his books about Einstein, “Einstein: His Life and Universe” was the subject of the miniseries GENIUS, with Geoffrey Rush starring at the famed scientist.

Playing da Vinci can be considered destiny for DiCaprio, as he was named after the famous artist after his mother felt the then in utero actor kicking inside her while she was looking at a da Vinci piece while in Florence back in 1974.

DiCaprio is amazing at everything, and will clearly knock the role out of the park. The last historical figure he played on this scale was as J. Edgar Hoover in Clint Eastwood’s J. EDGAR, playing the man from his young days at the FBI all the way until his elder years. Though that movie failed to meet the hype set for it, a movie about da Vinci could prove more vastly more interesting, and give DiCaprio more material to explore than he ever has before. Another advantage to this is that even if DiCaprio decides to go all method for the movie, the other cast and crew members won’t have to worry about remembering to call him by his character’s name around the set.