Leonardo DiCaprio missed out on a Best Actor nomination for Killers of the Flower Moon, but based on what filmmaker Martin Scorsese has said about his improv skills during the film’s production, DiCaprio might be our new king of comedy.
At an October 2023 press conference to support the film, Scorsese shared that DiCaprio improvised the line “Well, I don’t know what that was, but it must have been Indian for handsome devil†in a scene where his character, Ernest Burkhart, is driving Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Kyle around the Osage reservation. It’s the first lighthearted moment between the two of them and generated a “laugh for real†from Gladstone, Scorsese said. And at a January 26 event at Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian celebrating the film’s ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Gladstone, and Best Original Song for the Osage singers, Scorsese shared a new story about DiCaprio’s flirty improv skills.
When asked about her onscreen chemistry with DiCaprio, Gladstone explained the two never read together before she was cast. They built a bond together during production, but Scorsese’s longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker — who wasn’t on set and reviewed footage that Scorsese sent to her daily — thought the film needed one more scene emphasizing Ernest and Mollie’s love story, which the creative team considered the emotional core of the film. So Scorsese wrote a scene one morning that they shot the same day, in which Ernest and Mollie are now married and he’s enjoying her money and scheming with his uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro), to gain her family’s oil rights; Mollie, meanwhile, is beginning to worry that Ernest might not love her. When he insists that he does and goes to her side in bed, the two begin to fool around. As Mollie unbuttons his shirt, Ernest jokes, “You gonna try to wake the kids up now.†That cheeky line was all DiCaprio (if you don’t believe Scorsese, just know that the line isn’t in the film’s August 2022 final shooting script) and got a genuine laugh out of Gladstone.
DiCaprio isn’t necessarily known for comedic timing, but if you’ve seen Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, then you know it’s there. That said, it is a little shocking he’s never hosted Saturday Night Live. Whatever it takes to get DiCaprio and Sarah Squirm in the same room, we’ve gotta do it. Can someone get the people’s nepo baby, Francesca Scorsese, on the case?