Leonardo DiCaprio Once Said He Rejected ‘American Psycho’ Because It ‘Didn’t Mean Anything’

Leonardo DiCaprio was once approached for American Psycho before Christian Bale made the role and the film his own. Although it’s been theorized why DiCaprio ultimately walked away from the project, DiCaprio himself felt there wasn’t much substance to the project.

Christian Bale almost lost out to Leonardo DiCaprio for ‘American Psycho’

Not too long ago Christian Bale thanked DiCaprio for rejecting certain film roles. Bale joked that his career received a bit of a boost as a result.

“Look, to this day, any role that anybody gets, it’s only because he’s passed on it beforehand. It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you,” Bale said in an interview with GQ not too long ago. “It doesn’t matter how friendly you are with the directors. All those people that I’ve worked with multiple times, they all offered every one of those roles to him first. Right? I had one of those people actually tell me that. So, thank you, Leo, because literally, he gets to choose everything he does. And good for him, he’s phenomenal.”

Bale’s portrayal of a wall street serial killer in American Psycho was one of the many roles Bale was referring to. The film was directed by Mary Harron, who envisioned Bale as American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman in the first place. But the studio behind the film had DiCaprio in mind for the part. Harron was briefly fired because she refused to cast the studio’s pick, and even rejected meeting DiCaprio beforehand.

“I knew I would find him charming, and then I would find myself getting into doing it with him. You have to trust your instinct, or else it’s going to be a disaster. They would change the script and try to make the character more sympathetic, and it was just going to lose anything it really had,” Harron once told Vice.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s real reason for turning down ‘American Psycho’

Harron would eventually be re-hired and got her wish to cast Bale as the iconic villain after DiCaprio dropped out of the project. American Psycho screenwriter Guinevere Turner heard that DiCaprio was dissuaded from doing the film.

“My friend, who had just spoken to Gloria Steinem, said that Gloria Steinem took Leonard DiCaprio to a Yankees game, I believe, and said, ‘Please don’t do this movie. Coming off of Titanic, there is an entire planet full of 13-year-old girls waiting to see what you do next, and this is going to be a movie that has horrible violence toward women,’” Turner recalled.

But DiCaprio once claimed his involvement with the movie might have been exaggerated.

“I read the script and sort of expressed interest in it,” DiCaprio once told The Morning Call. “During that whole hot air balloon of Titanic media, it became something bigger than what it was. Actors do that all the time. They say, ‘I like this script.’”

DiCaprio simply felt the script didn’t have the type of depth he was looking for in his post-Titanic career.

“Eventually, I realized it [American Psycho) didn’t amount to anything and didn’t mean anything in the end,” he said.

The movie Leonardo DiCaprio picked over ‘American Psycho’

With American Psycho lacking what DiCaprio was searching for, the movie star opened up about the types of projects he was attracted to.

“After Titanic, I really wanted to take my time and really read through everything and say, ‘OK, I don’t really want to do something that other people tell me is genius. I want to find something that strikes a chord in me,’” he said.

That something was the 2000 Danny Boyle film The Beach. When Boyle presented DiCaprio with the script, the Oscar-winner instantly fell in love with the story.

“Without speaking for my generation, it talks about how we’ve been sort of so desensitized in a lot of ways and how we’re so influenced by the media. And everything is nowadays seeming more and more prepackaged and predigested and pre-thought-out for us,” he said. “This character [Richard] goes in search of something real and something tangible — real emotion or real experience — that he can connect with. He goes traveling to Thailand.”

The majority of audiences didn’t seem to share DiCaprio’s enthusiasm of the film, however. DiCaprio once even received a Razzie award thanks to The Beach. But Bale’s career only flourished after American Psycho, a feature that became a permanent part of pop culture.