Leonardo DiCaprio Just Got The Most Unusual Honor Of His Career
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio has just received a notable honor in his illustrious career, and it isn't for acting.
This article is more than 2 years old
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio has just received a notable honor in his illustrious career. The star of Titanic and The Aviator has had a newly discovered tree named after him. The tropical tree will be known as uvariopsis dicaprio, in recognition of his work for conservation. The tree is the first new species in 2022 to be added to the Royal Botanic Kew Gardens list in the United Kingdom. Many newly discovered species (plant or otherwise) are named after the researcher who discovers them. This particular plant species is a key element of the Ebo Forest in Cameroon. That area houses the Yabassi Key Biodiversity Area, which was set to be logged before DiCaprio helped bring it to public attention.
This is a slightly different award from what Leonardo DiCaprio has received in the past. So far in his career, he has won a BAFTA, three Golden Globes and an Oscar for Best Actor. DiCaprio received the latter for 2015’s The Revenant, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. It was something of a cultural joke for many years that DiCaprio was tirelessly working for an Academy Award. At one point, there was even an online game poking fun at the idea, an arcade-style platformer called Leo’s Red Carpet Rampage. But while many people in Hollywood have won an Academy Award, the list of those people who now have a plant species named in their honor is presumably smaller.
Leonardo DiCaprio most recently appeared in Netflix’s Don’t Look Up. The film co-starred fellow Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and was directed by Adam McKay. A satire of society and politics as two ordinary scientists (played by the mega-charismatic and beautiful DiCaprio and Lawrence, naturally) discover a comet heading on a collision course with Earth. Don’t Look Up has met with middling reviews and is currently standing at a critics percentage of 55% (per Rotten Tomatoes). However, streaming audiences seem less concerned. The Leonardo DiCaprio film is currently raging up Netflix’s viewing numbers, set to overtake Sandra Bullock’s 2018 thriller Bird Box.
After that, the Leonardo DiCaprio hit will most likely leap over the current number one viewed film on Netflix. That film, Red Notice, starring Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds was only released on November 12, 2021. So it appears that each successive Netflix release is picking up steam in the viewing numbers. At this same time, Leonardo DiCaprio is reportedly in talks to join the cast of Hulu’s Devil in the White City along with Keanu Reeves. The series is based on Erik Larson’s non-fiction novel based on murders around the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. DiCaprio purchased the rights for the adaptation way back in 2010. His longtime collaborator Martin Scorsese came on board sometime after.
As a production long in the works, it will be interesting to see if Leonardo DiCaprio successfully makes the leap to streaming prestige TV. He has not worked in television since his days as a child star in the early 1990s, and has since became one of our most critically esteemed actors who also has a tree named after him. So we’ll just have to see how it turns out.
