Planet Earth watch

LEONARDO DiCaprio's association with TAG Heuer has helped promote his environmental messages.

DiCaprio

LEONARDO DiCaprio's list of philanthropic achievements is nearly as long as his filmography.

Informing most of those extracurricular efforts is his environmental activism. DiCaprio is well known for championing climate-control and animal-welfare issues. On the personal side he has an electric car, has installed solar panels on his house and, unusually for a star of his calibre, he chooses commercial flights over chartering private jets. He's also donated large sums to environmental causes and charities as well as a considerable amount of time and, perhaps most importantly, his name. The landing page of his official website (leonardodicaprio.com) details his philanthropic projects and looks more like that of a NGO than a major Hollywood star. You have to search hard to find a glamour shot of him on his own site.

But the association with Hollywood glamour is what attracts international brands to seek out celebrity endorsement. Since 2009, DiCaprio has been one of TAG Heuer's many brand ambassadors, alongside Maria Sharapova, Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button and now Cameron Diaz. The right choice of celebrity can sell just about any product. The fee for doing so, no matter how generous, is not the deal clincher for a star such as DiCaprio, one of Hollywood's highest paid stars (an estimated $77 million for the 12 months ending May 1, 2011, according to Forbes). What sealed the deal for DiCaprio was the opportunity to use his association with the Swiss watch company to get his environmental message out there.

"Initially it was my idea to use the relationship to promote my environmental work," DiCaprio told WISH recently. "But Jean-Christophe Babin [chief executive of TAG Heuer] was incredibly enthusiastic about the thought of bringing much-needed funds to environmental organisations through this sort of relationship that we have formulated. It just seemed like the right fit."

As part of the association with DiCaprio, TAG Heuer produced a limited edition co-branded Aquaracer 500 watch in 2009 and generated royalties from that watch which went to support the Natural Resource Defense Council in the US and Green Cross International. DiCaprio also worked with TAG Heuer on ways in which the company could reduce its energy consumption and its sustainability policy. "First off, I was immediately attracted to working with a company that was willing to give back and who wanted to create changes within its own organisation that would also benefit the environment," says DiCaprio, who for his part provided a multi-million-dollar commitment to support these and other environmental charities, according to Green Cross International.

It's easy to get swept up in all this bonhomie but there are few who doubt DiCaprio's commitment to the environmental cause and in talking to him it becomes clear that he is as passionate about saving the planet as he is about acting. "I've been interested in environmental issues ever since I can remember, ever since I was a little kid in Los Angeles," says the 37-year-old actor who was born and raised in LA. "I was very influenced by nature documentaries specifically the IMAX films on the rainforests when I was very young and I remember being profoundly affected by the depletion of the world's resources and species that were on the brink of extinction. In my adult life I became more proactive with different NGOs around the world to try to help out as best as I can. It was always a second passion of mine and I've always said that if I wasn't going to be an actor I was going to be a marine biologist or a biologist of some kind. Since I got to do what I wanted to do as a profession, which was being an actor, this has been my second job when I'm not working on films."

Relationships - professional ones - have been the hallmark of DiCaprio's impressive career in Hollywood. He has worked with director Martin Scorsese on three films and is due to work with him again starring in The Wolf of Wall Street, which is expected to be released next year. He's starred opposite Kate Winslet twice and has recently completed his second film with director Baz Luhrmann, The Great Gatsby. Filming Gatsby in Australia, in which he stars alongside long-time friend Tobey Maguire, he says, was a refreshing break from working in Hollywood. "It was really great to work with an Australian crew and all these great Australian actors and to see their enthusiasm for doing a film like this," says DiCaprio. "Especially for Tobey and me, being born and bred in Hollywood, not having cynicism towards it, but certainly having been around this environment all our lives, to go to a place where it felt like anything could happen on those sets, it was magical at times."

DiCaprio, who starred in Luhrmann's 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, says that Luhrmann has an infectious enthusiasm for what he's doing that he can't, as an actor, help but get swept up in. "He's incredibly inspirational for everyone around him and he just gets you so excited about doing the work ... and he makes you look at it in a completely different way. There's nothing that Baz won't do to get to the absolute truth of what he wants to put on screen, he's an incredibly passionate filmmaker.

"Like I said, for actors who have been in the landscape of Los Angeles for a while that is an amazing feeling. He inspires everyone around him and everyone just wants to keep going and going because he has this undeniable energy about his work. I'd love to work with him again.

It's just an amazing experience."

For DiCaprio, part of that experience involved a considerable amount of research into F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby as well as its precursor, Fitzgerald's Trimalchio. He also watched every film version of the novel, which as well as Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 version includes a silent version from 1926 and a 1949 version starring Alan Ladd and Shelley Winters. "I pretty much saw everything and we read the book religiously as well as early letters from Fitzgerald and studying American history in the roaring '20s," he says. "I feel I could do a college thesis on that book now. For me the idea of playing such a desperate man and somebody that was almost, that completely didn't have any sense of his own self, and had to create all that was fascinating. It's all in the book, especially in Trimalchio, which was the unedited version of Great Gatsby and we got to incorporate a lot of Trimalchio into the movie as well.

"I always do a tremendous amount of research especially if it's a historical figure because there are so many things that you want to create accurately but, more than that, you want to get a sense of who these individuals were, whether it be Howard Hughes or J. Edgar Hoover. These people are so fascinating to me because often the choices they have made in their lives contradict their actions. Often they do things that are just completely bizarre, that no writer could ever create, so there's something really fantastic about doing that detective work for me."

Despite being one of Hollywood's most bankable stars and having more than 25 feature films under his belt, DiCaprio says that what happens to a movie once it's released is still a mystery to him. "I've learnt that in this industry all you can do is your absolute best and to be as truthful to the world that you are trying to put on screen as you possibly can. You never really know what an audience is going to cling to," he says. "It's always surprising to me and it will always be a mystery to me and, you know, no one has the right answer every time and no one can make a masterpiece every time and no one can always give a profoundly moving performance. You just try your best, that is the eternal challenge about doing what we do and that's why it's a lot of fun because it's always the roll of the dice."