Leo vs. Tom: Two different paths to stardom

Different routes to stardom
Jay Mechling is a professor of American studies at the University of California-Davis who specializes in the topic of masculinity. Although DiCaprio and Cruise both are considered charismatic leading men, he said they achieve that status in different ways.

“With DiCaprio, there has always been this slightly cocky kind of performance of masculinity that is out of tune with his presence,” Mechling said. “For me that touches the underlying business in masculinity studies in that masculinity is a very fragile construction. The little boy has to separate himself from the mother and identify with the masculine.

“If you look at boys friendship groups, like the Boy Scouts, two of the usual features are a lot of homophobia and misogyny. Teasing, pranks, name-calling, always around separating the masculine from the feminine. The feminine side is repressed and put aside. What it means, therefore, is that masculinity is always a performance, because it’s always so fragile and it’s always being tested.

“DiCaprio really captures that well, even on his rough side. There’s always the soft side to masculinity and fragility. Going back to ‘This Boy’s Life,’ there is an attempt to be a masculine teenager, but there is an underlying softness to him. With DiCaprio it helps that even though he gets older he still looks 15.”

But Mechling does not see the same quality in Cruise. “Tom Cruise, on the other hand, really has identified with macho roles,” he explained. “Although he does an occasional film with softness to it, I don’t think he embodies that ambiguity and danger and precariousness of performance in the same way DiCaprio does.”

And then there is the added baggage that comes with being Tom Cruise off the set, complete with rumor and innuendo. Mechling said that not only has an effect on perception, it might also play into Cruise’s choices of roles.

“It’s complicated, of course, by the sort of underground and not so underground talk of Tom Cruise and his sexuality,” Mechling said. “That complicates it 100 times. Has Tom Cruise ever chosen a film role that has that same kind of fragility of masculinity that Leo DiCaprio’s films have? It may be overcompensation.”

Schwartz noted that DiCaprio’s face made him a worldwide sensation after “Titanic” in 1997 — and it could have capsized his career. “It’s taken him a long time to convince people he’s a man and not a cute boy standing on top of a ship,” she said.

It took a while for Honeycutt to accept DiCaprio’s transition from boy to man as well. “I think ‘Blood Diamond’ (in 2006) was the first time I saw him as an adult where I bought him as an adult,” he said.

No matter their differences, they remain two of the most celebrated movie stars of their time. Said Schwartz: “They’ve just taken very different paths.”

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