Not even Chuck Norris could have endured the kinds of horrors frontiersman Hugh Glass survived. In 1823, Glass was mauled by a grizzly bear but managed to crawl 200 miles — with a broken leg and gangrenous wounds — to exact revenge on the men who took his weapons and left him for dead. He ate berries to stay alive and used maggots to treat the deep gashes on his back. That’s some pretty extreme Eagle Scouting.
The whole harrowing ordeal is the subject of Alejandro I??rritu’s Golden Globe nominee and likely Oscar contender “The Revenant.” And that means that the director (who won some Academy Awards earlier this year for “Birdman”) is reacquainting the masses with a folk hero whose name used to be synonymous with feats of impossible outlandishness.
But Glass isn’t the only legendary character to emerge from the movie. The other is Leonardo DiCaprio, the Oscarless actor who plays Glass. With each interview, some new tidbit seems to emerge about the extent of the torturousness of making “The Revenant.” It just keeps getting worse and worse.
How bad was it? Let’s take a look at some of the trials that DiCaprio had to survive in order to make the movie and maybe — finally — score that Oscar.
• He lived with a bedraggled beard for a year-and-a-half: So this isn’t particularly difficult, though it probably got a bit itchy. But like all great legends, the Tale of the Beard took on a life of its own. DiCaprio’s unruly facial hair was pretty gross, so it was only a matter of time before the National Enquirer published gossip about fleas forming a community inside of Leo’s hair nest.
• He was covered with (imported) ants: I??rritu told Variety that he really, really wanted to show DiCaprio with ants all over him. But, insects being scarce on location, the director had to fly them in from British Columbia on two different planes. (The first group didn’t fare so well.)
• He worked through sick days: DiCaprio says he came down with the flu a few times while filming. The awful cough you hear coming from DiCaprio when he’s being carried on a stretcher post-bear attack wasn’t just inserted to legitimize the character’s misery. That was DiCaprio’s actual, phlegmy misery.
• He ate a raw bison liver: DiCaprio is a vegetarian, so when his character bites into a raw bison liver, you would think the actor would go with what the prop department gives him — some jelly-like replica of an organ. But DiCaprio didn’t think it looked authentic enough, so he decided to go with the real thing.
“It’s like a balloon. When you bite into it, it bursts in your mouth,” DiCaprio explained to Variety.
