27 November 2015
Newsdesk
Leonardo DiCaprio has overtaken Michael Fassbender to become the frontrunner in the Oscars Best Actor race, according to top critics.
The 41-year-old actor has already achieved critical acclaim for his role in upcoming film The Revenant.
In fact, the movie is receiving such rave reviews that Leonardo’s performance has seen him overtake Michael Fassbender as frontrunner for the Best Actor Oscar at the 2016 ceremony.
Michael topped awards show odds site GoldDerby.com just before his latest offering Steve Jobs was released in the U.S., but the Danny Boyle biopic flopped in America and it seems to have ended the Irish actor's Academy Awards dreams.
Leonardo is now back at the top, according to America's top movie critics, who update their scores on the website weekly.
The Departed star was the first leader of the GoldDerby.com race back in early September (15), but he was overtaken by 2015 Best Actor winner Eddie Redmayne, who wowed critics with his portrayal of transgender artist Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl. Johnny Depp also briefly took over at the top when his film Black Mass was released.
Leonardo now has the support of 11 of the 22 film experts at GoldDerby, while Fassbender's odds are dropping fast - from 23/10 to 3/1.
The Revenant sees Leonardo star as Hugh Glass, a frontierman who vows to get revenge on those who left him for dead after a vicious bear mauling.
The film also stars Tom Hardy and Will Poulter, and saw the cast take on some extreme conditions when they filmed in the freezing cold Tierra del Fuego region of Argentina.
Leonardo has always been an actor who takes his craft seriously, but admitted in a recent interview that this role pushed him to his limits in every way possible.
"I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I've ever had to do," he told Yahoo! Movies.
"Whether it's going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set. (I was) enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly."