Leonardo DiCaprio’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood Moustache “Drove Him Mad”
“It was so hot out and the mustache kept going in his mouth, and he’d be spitting it out.”
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (there’s an ellipsis in there that I categorically refuse to use) is doing the biggest box office numbers of director Quentin Tarantino’s career. The film is huge, full of major star power (Leonardo DiCaprio! Brad Pitt!) and every day new stories come out about its idiosyncratic production. Like how apparently DiCaprio really, really hated his long, fake, horseshoe-shaped moustache.
DiCaprio sported the ‘stache for a the film’s endless Western sequences, in which his character, washed-up actor Rick Dalton, guest stars on a cowboy show and films a bunch of “Spaghetti Westerns” in Italy (gaining fifteen pounds and an Italian wife in the process). According to the star’s longtime makeup artist Siân Grigg, he really, really hated it.
“The mustache drove Leo mad, because I had to leave it really long and it always went in his mouth,” Grigg told The Hollywood Reporter. “It was so hot out and the mustache kept going in his mouth, and he’d be spitting it out. He did the same thing in the scene as they filmed ‘off camera’ when he was supposed to be losing it a bit. It made us laugh as he kept spitting it out and the wig was quite long as well.”
Grigg added that the facial hair was supposed to look exaggerated and artificial. “It was meant to look phony because they didn’t have good materials back then like we do now. It was correct for the period — a Western film being made in the ’70s,” she said. “We were copying the style of films shot in that period and also covering Leo’s character up to look different and unrecognizable, which in the movie he’s not used to.”
There’s no word yet on Camila Morrone’s facial hair preferences.
