‘The moment Leonardo DiCaprio snubbed me’

Former PM approached actor at Cop26 and started quoting one of his characters in a South African accent

A starstruck Boris Johnson adopted a “South African” accent when he bumped into Leonardo DiCaprio and started quoting lines from his films back to him.
The former prime minister said he encountered the Hollywood actor and staunch environmentalist in November 2021 at the Cop26 climate change summit in Glasgow.
However, after realising that DiCaprio was in a hurry, Mr Johnson burst out with quotes from the star’s film Blood Diamond, a dialogue his family knew “by heart”.
DiCaprio plays the “brusque, cynical” Danny Archer, a “hard-bitten white Rhodesian gunrunner and gem smuggler” in the 2007 hit, set during the Sierra Leone civil war.
“As he quickened his pace, I found myself speaking in a thick South African accent and quoting some of his greatest lines,” Mr Johnson writes in his book, Unleashed.
“At the sound of the UK PM impersonating DiCaprio impersonating a South African gunrunner, the film star checked his stride. He looked at me appraisingly. ‘I will see you later, my friend’, he said, and stalked off.”
Before the interaction, Mr Johnson describes recognising the star in the distance and finding himself running through numerous scenarios as to why the actor would be marching his way.
“He was ten yards away, striding towards me down the prefab corridor, right here in the convention centre where the world’s leaders had come together to stop the world from being fried,” he writes.
“He was getting closer. Yes, he seemed to have some business with us, little old us – the UK presidency of the UN conference on climate change, known as COP 26. What could he want?”
Mr Johnson and his team were then informed that the Titanic actor did not want “to sound the alarm about the iceberg ahead”, but wanted access to his toilet within the presidential suite.
It was only after he saw DiCaprio emerge from the bathrooms that he approached him. Mr Johnson describes the “real life” actor as seeming “taller and bulkier than the screen idol”.
It is the second time DiCaprio is mentioned in the book, the first being when Mr Johnson is handed an iPad full of films while in the ICU with Covid in April 2020.
Mr Johnson, who spent three days in intensive care as he battled the virus, writes about how he watched The Revenant – in which DiCaprio plays an eighteenth-century fur trapper in Canada who gets badly mauled by a bear – in an attempt to stay awake, terrified that he might fall asleep and never wake up.
Unleashed by Boris Johnson will be published by William Collins on 10th October (£30); books.telegraph.co.uk