This past October, while describing the extreme lengths to which he went while filming The Revenant, Leonardo DiCaprio volunteered, somewhat nonchalantly, that he ate raw bison liver. “I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do,” the actor said of his work on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s survival epic. “Whether it’s going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set.” And now, in a new interview, the three-time Oscar-nominated actor explains why, exactly, he ate an uncooked animal organ when the reportedly $135 million drama certainly had the budget for a fake.
While speaking to Variety, DiCaprio admits that the prop department did indeed build a faux bison liver from jelly—certainly a more edible alternative to the authentic organ. But DiCaprio, concerned that the fake did not look genuine, volunteered to eat an actual bison liver. In addition to the challenge of finding a real bison liver, however, production had to get permission to feed one of Hollywood’s most valuable movie stars a raw, potentially diseased animal organ by getting clearance from both his team of lawyers and agents.
DiCaprio generously walks Variety through the experience of biting into uncooked bison liver, explaining, “The bad part is the membrane around it. . . . It’s like a balloon. When you bite into it, it bursts in your mouth.”
Speaking to Yahoo several months back, DiCaprio confirmed that Iñárritu included the take of him eating the real deal in the final cut of the film. “When you see the movie, you’ll see my reaction to it, because Alejandro kept it in,” DiCaprio revealed. “It says it all. It was an instinctive reaction.”
“Without it, he may not have gotten to the truth,” Iñárritu said of DiCaprio’s edible sacrifice, even though the Birdman director did have his own concerns—specifically, as Variety writes, “could [he] get sick from eating a potentially disease-ridden organ”?
Ultimately, the actor did fall ill, but due to the hypothermia-caliber weather conditions rather than the liver. Says DiCaprio, “I got the flu quite a few times.”
Several months back, DiCaprio shared that in addition to braving the cold and the bison liver, he also slept in animal carcasses for his Oscar-worthy performance.
