Entertainment

Leo Explains Crucial 'Wolf of Wall Street' Scene

by Ivy Jacobson

Even though Leonardo DiCaprio is up for an Oscar for The Wolf of Wall Street, that doesn't mean that the ever-distinguished actor wasn't inspired by something as simple as an insanely drunk man in a YouTube video for one of his most riveting scenes. SPOILER ALERT: In one of the film's most riveting and telling scenes, DiCaprio's character, Jordan Belfort, completely unravels after he takes too many Quaaludes and has to deal with the sedative and hypnotic aftermath. Much of the drugged-out sequence, where DiCaprio has to get from inside of a country club to his Lamborghini outside, was improvised. However, at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Leonardo DiCaprio revealed that the YouTube video aptly titled "Drunkest Guy in the World" greatly influenced the scene.

"A lot of the research that I did really came from watching this one video on loop," DiCaprio says. "It's called 'The Drunkest [Guy] in the World'. It's a man trying to get a beer, but his body doesn't quite [work]. That was a huge inspiration to me."

DiCaprio painstakingly dragged himself across the lobby of the club and rolled himself down the stairs in the pivotal scene, which was painful and fascinating to watch, because he didn't have any control over his body. In the YouTube video, the drunk man keeps falling down in a 7-Eleven and tries to crawl and drag himself up in an attempt to purchase beer, captured on a security video.

"It's not just the fact that he was sort of elasticated and trying to get [up], it was his motivation that was really intriguing," says DiCaprio. "He had one singular goal, one that was to get a beer out of the 7-Eleven, and it took him a half an hour."

DiCaprio is nominated for Best Actor, and The Wolf of Wall Street is nominated for five Oscar awards overall.

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