Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio shared a story from his childhood recently that caught a lot of attention. Apparently, when he was starting out as a child actor, an agent wanted his stage name to be Lenny Williams because “Leonardo DiCaprio” was “too ethnic”: “They’re never gonna hire you,” the agent allegedly told DiCaprio … before he became a household name.
In a conversation on the podcast “New Heights,” the actor said his father put an end to the nonsense about a name change. Though in fairness to the agent, Ramon Antonio Gerardo Estevez changed his name to Martin Sheen and did OK with that, and George Michael was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou. In fact, Benicio del Toro, DiCaprio’s co-star in the upcoming film “One Battle After Another,” said one of his early agents wanted him to be “Benny Del.”
Their early days of trying to make it sound just like a fable….
Once upon a time, an inspiring young actor with bushy red hair and a toothy gapped smile decided to move from Cliffside Park, N.J., to La La Land. After days of fast food, he was looking forward to something authentic. That’s when, while driving down Somestreet Boulevard, he stumbled across a brightly painted food truck with a neon sign that flashed “The Mystic Taco.”
Intrigued, he parked and made his way to the truck.
“What do you recommend?” he asked the woman taking orders, in an obvious flirtatious manner. Slightly annoyed, the woman replies, “that depends on what you want,” in that tone a bartender uses when they flirt for the tips and not the digits.
“I want to make it in show business,” the young actor said, committed to making this awkward for both of them.
“The No. 5,” the cashier said with a blank face. “It’s our most popular dish.”
The menu listed two tacos and a fortune told.
“Do you have anything plant based?”
The cashier nods, turns her head slightly to her right and yells “No. 5, no guts.”
Technically that was true, but it still sounded like an insult to him.
Included with his vegan tacos meal was a teaspoon of street corn and a toy pocket compass. Smiling at the whimsy of it all, the actor flipped it open and saw it looked as if it had been bedazzled by a 3-year-old holding two glue guns. The mirror on the lid looked like it came from Barbie’s Dreamhouse. The needle spun wildly as if the Earth’s magnetic field were spinning out of sync with the planet.
Sensing the actor’s trepidation, the woman assured him that if he looked at it before every audition, the needle would point him in the right direction.
And so he took his tacos and trinket and tried to make it in show business.
When the actor went to his first audition, he opened the compass. The needle stopped spinning and pointed straight ahead. The actor looked up across from him and noticed another man there had brown curly hair. Panicked he was wrong for the role, the young actor abruptly left the room where the audition was being held and headed to the nearest salon to change his hair from red to brown. At his next audition, the actor again opened the compass, and this time it pointed to a man with big muscles and skinny jeans, and so the actor left the audition, joined a gym and went shopping at H&M.
He did this for a week.
Whenever the young actor went to an audition, he would open the compass, the needle would point straight ahead, and the actor learned what he needed to change next. But then weeks turned into a month and still the young actor had yet to audition much less land a role. He changed his name, closed the gap in his smile, got a nose job and a Brazilian butt lift — which made getting into the skinny jeans challenging — and yet each time he opened the compass, the needle pointed to someone else he needed to be.
A year later the actor was on his way to yet another audition when he noticed the Mystic Taco food truck parked on the other side of Somestreet Boulevard. He made a U-turn, got out and marched toward the front of the line. He struggled to take the compass out of his now-tight pocket.
“This thing does not work,” he yelled at the woman who sold him the No. 5 with no guts.
“Sure it does,” she said defensively.
The actor then explained that each time he opened the compass at an audition, it would direct him toward someone else he’s supposed to be. The woman let out a disapproving sigh, the way a mixologist responds to an order for Jagerbombs.
“The needle wasn’t pointing at other people,” she said. “It was pointing toward the mirror. That’s because the key to making it in show business or anywhere else is to be yourself.”
What a relief that our two real-life actors had the good sense to remain Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro. Lenny and Benny wouldn’t be able to look at themselves in the mirror.
YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow
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