A new shirtless pic of Leonardo Dicaprio leaked from next month's Rolling Stone is making its way around the interwebs today, but it's not quite the steamy abdominal-porn we were hoping for. Is Leo's losing his sex symbol status?
When Leo first started making a name for himself in Hollywood, we were still young enough to be card-carrying members of the "Leonardo Di-crappy-o" anti-fan club. But even then we knew that the guy was hot. Hell, the only reason our friends and we hated him so much was because all the girls were so busy swooning over him. Leo, with his rakishly thin body and his stupid late 90s-early 2000s bangs came to define hotness for a certain age group.
If Dicaprio were doing a feature in Rolling Stone back in 2001 (or even as recently as 2006—he was pretty hot in "The Departed"), we're sure the shoot would have been all soaked poolside lounging and soaked white t-shirts. Now we get this sort of boring, gut-disguising shot of him lying on a bed. Yes, not every picture of a shirtless man exists for the sole purpose of arousing us sexually, but it'd be nice if they all did. And why have him do the shirtless photo at all now? We're not saying that people aren't allowed to put on a few pounds with age. We're just saying that movie stars aren't people.
One could argue that maybe the string of roles that lead him from teenage heartthrob status to "Serious Actor," (often as Martin Scorcese's working class everyman muse) has been keeping him from the gym. By comparison, look at Ashton Kutcher and Bradley Cooper—both actors of a similar age whose roles still tend to revolve around their good looks and, by extension, their incredibly sculpted bodies. Nobody ever said that you had to be gorgeous and possessed of a flawless body to be a great actor. Still, we don't always mind the fact that Hollywood likes to pretend that that's true. It's not like Leo's gotten fat or anything. He's the very definition of "average build." But do we want to have sex with him? We can't decide.
· Leonardo DiCaprio on the 'Titanic' shadow, fame before TMZ