HOW LEO BECAME A BAD DAD

Leonardo DiCaprio tells how he brought to life a radical struggling to connect with his teenage daughter

- INTERVIEW: GILL PRINGLE

Leonardo DiCaprio has surely taken a cue from Jeff Bridges’s immortal The Big Lebowski as he portrays a bathrobe-wearing stoner in the action film One Battle After Another.

Leo may rarely do comedy, but in his surprising new role, he’s hilarious as a former revolutionary, now a paranoid pothead and single dad, hopelessly trying to raise a teenage daughter.

As washed-up Bob languishes on the couch in a ratty robe with a man bun, and a bong in his hand, his self-reliant daughter, Willa, has long been the only adult in this relationship.

“It’s not this utopian happy villager setup. It’s a father disconnecting with his daughter. He’s a disaster of a father, and then, all of a sudden, he’s put into this wild circumstance to try to save her,” Leo says.

Bob has been living off-grid for so long that he can’t even remember who the enemy is, let alone the passwords required to summon his comrades to action.

Once revered as the “Rocketman”, thanks to his skills with explosives, he is now a lonely shell of himself without his partner in crime, the formidable radical known as Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), who is also the mother of his daughter.

Bob’s greatest fear is Sean Penn’s twisted Colonel Lockjaw, who will stop at nothing to capture Willa, still furious after Perfidia escaped his clutches over a decade ago.