In the annals of Hollywood’s great near-misses, John C. Reilly has just added a vivid new chapter: the afternoon he sat across from a 22-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio in Silver Lake and told him, in plain terms, that nobody was going to care about whoever happened to be riding the Titanic.
Appearing on Ted Danson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, Reilly recalled that director Paul Thomas Anderson’s first choice to play porn star Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights was DiCaprio — and that Reilly, having bonded with the actor on What’s Eating Gilbert Grape in 1993, volunteered to seal the deal. “Give me the assignment, Paul. I’ll get this guy to do your movie,” Reilly told Anderson, confident in the friendship he’d built with DiCaprio since meeting him at 17.
The pitch meeting happened on Hillhurst in Silver Lake, where Reilly made his case directly. There was, however, a significant obstacle — DiCaprio had also been offered the lead in James Cameron’s Titanic. Part of the problem was the subject matter: agents across Hollywood were recoiling from Boogie Nights because of its adult film setting. “All these actors and their managers and their agents were like, ‘Porn? Whoa, whoa, man. No. No,'” Reilly recalled.
Reilly pressed his case on two fronts: the boat argument and the director argument. He told DiCaprio that Anderson was going to become one of the most talented film directors of his generation and that missing the opportunity would be a mistake. DiCaprio wasn’t entirely sold. His agents were convinced Titanic was destined to be a very big movie. Reilly pushed back: “I’m telling you, I wouldn’t give you a bum steer here. It’s about a boat that sinks.”
DiCaprio chose the boat. Titanic grossed $1.84 billion in its original run, and Mark Wahlberg stepped in to play Dirk Diggler. Wahlberg himself has said his biggest regret is not doing Boogie Nights — he said it was a profound movie of his generation and he couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role.
The story has a coda. Reilly reflected on DiCaprio’s mixed feelings about the choice, saying the massive success of Titanic was “both a blessing and a curse” for a young man who must have wondered about the road not taken. DiCaprio eventually worked with Anderson on One Battle After Another, the Oscar-winning film that earned him his third Academy Award — a reunion that Reilly called “very satisfying.”
