Leonardo DiCaprio’s 10 Most Incredible Performances

10) Blood Diamond

For a man of such considerable charm, DiCaprio does slimy surprisingly well. To play the chain-smoking and entirely self-serving gun runner Danny Archer in Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond, DiCaprio virtually spits out dialogue like venom. He hits the Afrikaans accent a tad hard, but the arrogant swagger and self-satisfied air are spot-on.

It’s Djimon Hounsou’s film really, but DiCaprio is no less impressive as an entitled white African, still referring to his home country of Zimbabwe as the colonial ‘Rhodesia’. Both Archer and DiCaprio become less interesting as Zwick sends the character on a journey of redemption come the end, but for the most part the movie shows us just how satisfying it can be to watch DiCaprio go bad.

9) The Departed

Martin Scorsese’s finest working relationship with an actor remains that which he shared with Robert De Niro, but a look at his recent filmography shows his pairing with DiCaprio comes a close second.

Together they’ve made five movies in total, and undoubtedly one of their most entertaining – and one of the most successful for DiCaprio’s progression as an actor – is cops-and-robbers epic The Departed.

As Billy Costigan, the young cop infiltrating Boston’s Irish-American mob, DiCaprio is required to be permanently anxious. It’s a high energy performance, conveying the paranoia and fear of a man out of his depth in a world of violence. This is DiCaprio forced to subvert any leading man heroism and remain in a constant state of desperation; throughout, he looks like someone struggling just to keep it together.