On Tuesday, January 7, our colleagues from Brut were broadcasting L’Interview d’Aymeric on Youtube. In this edition, the journalist received Guillaume Canet, on promotion for To Lifethe action thriller released on January 10, 2025 on Netflix. As he looked back over his entire career, from his beginnings to Asterix and Obelix: the Middle Kingdomwhich he wrote and directed, including his meeting with Martin Scorsese and his next film, Guillaume Canet remembered the filming of The Beachduring which he met Leonardo DiCaprio. A surprising anecdote which nevertheless gave birth to a beautiful friendship between the hero of Titanic and Marcel’s dad.
“I found it a bit ridiculous“: Guillaume Canet remembers his meeting with Leonardo DiCaprio and the actor’s hypocritical entourage
“When I met him, all the stuff that was around, I found it a bit ridiculous“, explained Guillaume Canet, remembering the shooting of the film The Beach. “We’ve been waiting for a few days,we were, the whole group of actors who were supposed to be this community on the island, with Danny Boyle (the director of The BeachEditor’s note)and we were doing percussion rehearsals and, at one point, we hear an assistant say to Danny Boyle ‘He’s here, he’s here, he’s coming’ (‘He’s here, he’s there, he’s coming‘, in French, Editor’s note). It was the arrival of DiCaprio: we were in rehearsal, he arrives, and, each in turn, we had to do something percussion, and he arrives in turn and he does something, but rotten, like“, says the one who has not always been friends with Jean Dujardin while imitating a rhythm. “Something like this, and everyone: ‘Oh my god ! It’s amazing, it’s beautiful’ (‘Oh my God, it’s incredible, it’s so beautiful!‘, in French, Editor’s note) and it was a bit ridiculous actually“.
“We remained, still today, very close“: Guillaume Canet talks about his friendship with Leonardo DiCaprio since The Beach
“And me, At the time, I boxed a lot, I trained, I did amateur fights and all that (…) and there was an Italian actor who also boxed so in the evening we trained. And one evening he came down to the gym, Leo, to do some weight training with his bodyguards, and he looked at me askance like that, and when we hit, we went kss kss kss kss, like that. And he, the next day, he arrives on set and he makes fun of me: he makes me kss, kss, kss“, continues to tell Guillaume en Canet while imitating Leonardo DiCaprio who plays his fists. “And he hits me, like that, in the shoulder (…) and at one point he gives me a bit of a hard blow, and there, I turn around and I give him a right hand, in the hollow of the shoulder , where it hurts a little in the bone like that; bam! And there he does ‘Ahhhh !’there is a sort of silence on the set, and everyone looks at me as if I was completely stupid because I just punched the star of the film anyway – the guy who made I don’t know how many millions of entries with Titanic. There’s a sort of suspense about how he’s going to react, and he raises his head, dying of laughter, and he says to me ‘What are you doing tonight? We’re playing the Playstation with friends, do you want to come?’. And that’s it, we spent four months of friendship and we remained, still today, very close“, concluded Guillaume Canet before specifying, at the request of his interviewer, that they were playing games on the console James Bond et Doom.
