Did Eating This Obnoxious Meat Finally Get Leo The Oscar?

It’s no hidden fact that Leonardo Di Caprio’s Oscar win this year was no less than a milestone in Hollywood. The actor had previously been nominated for five, Academy Awards, eight Screen Actors Guild awards, three Baftas and two Saturn awards – and won none of them. Nope, not even for Titanic. Or Wolf of Wall Street. Or Blood Diamond. Life’s funny that way.

But 2016 is his year and after last night’s phenomenal win, no soul can deny that. The actor took home the Oscar for his mind-blowing, bone-chilling and nerve-wrecking performance in The Revenant. And apart from the long list of people that he acknowledged today at the Dolby Theatre, DiCaprio forgot to mention a vital name. Bison Liver.

Bison-tine Times

No, Bison Liver is not the name of his English friend. It’s what he ate to make his acting look realistic in The Revenant. According to reports, the actor went to extreme lengths to get his (now) award-winning performance right.

“I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do,” the DiCaprio said of his movie Alejandro González Iñárritu’s epic survival tale.

“Whether it’s going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set.” And now, in an interview the actor explains why he did so.

Leo admits that the prop department did craft a faux bison liver using jelly, which was definitely a more edible alternative than what he eventually went for. But DiCaprio, worried that the replica did not look quite genuine, volunteered to eat an actual bison liver.

The Real Deal

The challenge (apart from eating it) was actually finding a real bison liver. Also, production had to get permission to feed one of Hollywood’s most valuable movie stars a raw, potentially diseased animal organ by getting a green signal from both his team of lawyers and agents.

“The bad part is the membrane around it. It’s like a balloon. When you bite into it, it bursts in your mouth.” Ugh.

And as anticipated, the actor did fall sick. But this wasn’t due to the meat; it was because of the hypothermia-caliber weather conditions.

And The Oscar Goes To…

“Without it, he may not have gotten to the truth,” Iñárritu said of DiCaprio’s edible sacrifice.

In an interview sometime back, DiCaprio confirmed that Iñárritu included the take of him eating the real Bison liver 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.”

Our respect for Leo and his long-awaited win just went up by several notches!