by Gill Pringle in LA
Leonardo DiCaprio has surely taken a cue from Jeff Bridges’ immortal The Dude in playing a bathrobe-wearing stoner in his surprising new role in action dramedy One Battle After Another.
If DiCaprio rarely does comedy, then he’s truly hilarious as a former revolutionary, now a paranoid pothead and single dad, hopelessly trying to raise a teenage daughter.
As his washed-up man-bunned Bob languishes on the couch in a ratty robe with bong in hand – his self-reliant daughter Willa has long since become the only adult in this relationship.
“I would be remiss and lie if I didn’t say that obviously ‘The Dude’ was an influence on this character in a modern-day context. It’s not this utopian happy villager set up. It’s a father disconnecting with his daughter. He’s a disaster of a father, and then all of a sudden, he’s put into this wild circumstance to try to save her,” explains DiCaprio, 50, when we meet in Los Angeles.
With a supporting cast that includes Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn and Regina Hall, everyone brings their A-game, including Chase Infiniti making her big screen debut as Willa, the daughter of DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor’s revolutionary couple.
DiCaprio’s Bob has been living off-grid for so long that he can’t even remember who the enemy is – let alone the secret passwords required to summon his comrades to action.
Once revered as the “Rocketman” – thanks to his skills with explosives – today he’s a sad shell of himself without his partner in crime, the formidable radical known as “Perfidia Beverly Hills” [Taylor].
Bob’s greatest fear is Sean Penn’s twisted Colonel Lockjaw, who will stop at nothing to capture his daughter, still furious after Perfidia escaped his clutches more than a decade ago and is still in the wind.
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson – celebrated for Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood – DiCaprio has long wanted to work with him. “I would have done anything that Paul asked me to do, to be honest. But this just felt so incredibly pertinent to where we are as a society today.
“And I love the idea of this ex-revolutionary that is trying to connect with his daughter. He doesn’t have a phone, and there’s generational miscommunication between them.
“Just the imagination of this world where he’s pushing these extremes and the humour, but it’s also so topical and holding a mirror to society right now,” DiCaprio says of the film that opens in a nightmare Trump-style scenario with cages full of immigrants at the US border.
“He’s just trying to be a good dad, but he’s failing at every stop. He doesn’t know how to do it,” says the actor who is not a father himself.
The idea for One Battle After Another has gestated with Paul Thomas Anderson for more than 25 years.
“I’ve been writing this, in fits and starts for a long time,” he tells us. “Some of it as long ago as 1999 and then I went away from it and then came back and went away, came back. I wrote Phantom Thread instead, and then I got serious about it, and then I wrote Licorice Pizza instead. And [producer] Adam Somner, who we work with, said: ‘I think it’s enough fucking around. It’s time to finish this and do this,’” explains the director.
If Sean Penn’s wacko right wing immigrant-hating Colonel Lockjaw is one of the biggest revelations of the film – and surely an award-worthy performance – the actor is humble, shrugging off praise for his monstrous creation.
“Over the years, sometimes when one reads a script, a certain music comes into the head, and you start in. And I giggled a lot. And this was one of those ones, I sort of thought because one wouldn’t guess what Paul was doing next, and when I saw what he was doing next, I just thought – and it’s what I feel right now – this is a gift for an actor and for cinema, like I just thought… and I just was giddy, and kept reading,” says Penn whose Lockjaw becomes obsessed with Taylor’s Perdifia.
The actress clearly relished the role too. “Honestly, I think that Perfidia is badass. You know, would I be shooting a machine gun pregnant? Probably not. But the vision of it was, like, fucking iconic,” she says.
“But the reason why I have a soft spot for Perfidia is because – how she handled things as a mother is one thing. I definitely don’t agree with that – but I’ve been in a space of being in survival mode before. And survival mode is not a pretty place to be when you’re dealing with postpartum depression.
“And I’m a mother of two, and I feel like postpartum is something that people don’t really take seriously enough, or it’s not poured into enough, about how real and how dark it gets. So, I was able to empathise and give her grace and understand that she’s just trying to figure it out.
“She’s very complex, but she’s also in survival mode – and no one is doing anything to help her through that. I see a lot of myself in Perfidia, also being boisterous and feeling like: I will not be silenced!” says the actress who puts Lockjaw in his place with the classic line – “This pussy don’t pop for you.”
Without Perdifia at his side, Bob falls apart, loses interest in their causes, and – fast forward 15 years – is a pretty useless dad.
“[Bob] doesn’t necessarily make the right choices. And then he is left on his own to raise this child and is completely ill-equipped. He’s haunted by his past. She [Perfidia] leaves a wake of carnage through every character in this movie, and he’s trying to be a father and failing miserably,” explains DiCaprio.
“And just the setup, when his daughter gets kidnapped and his past comes back to haunt him – he’s sitting there stoned out of his mind, paranoid and in a robe, and lousily failing, you know?” DiCaprio smiles, noting that Bob is in his bathrobe for two-thirds of the movie during which he falls off a roof, gets tazered, is arrested, escapes and generally muddles his way through trying to find his daughter.
“There’s a traditional way to play this character, but I think Paul always takes an unexpected route. It’s the sheer pursuit of never giving up on the person that he loves, and that’s his heroism at the end of the day. He’s just a relentless hound dog that is falling off roofs and getting shocked, but he never gives up. And that’s his heroism. He’s a flawed protagonist, which I love to play,” says the actor.
“I love the fact that this guy had his own sort of political makeup, but 15 years later, that shit kind of changes, and then the wokeness that he grew up with has twisted into ‘don’t-tread-on-me-anti-government-I-don’t-want-to-hear-this-shit-anymore-I’m-tired-of-that-that’s my past.’
“And what happens when you set up a character that’s like an action film star who’s going to protect his daughter and defy all odds, but he can’t remember the goddamn password!?” he asks.
“And that sort of dominates his whole character in the first two acts. ‘I’m too stoned to remember the password! I can’t get out of the gate.’ It’s those unexpected choices and that sort of absurdity that makes this film unique to me,” he says.
One Battle After Another is in cinemas 25 September 2025
