Leonardo DiCaprio Is TIME’s 2025 Entertainer of the Year

At 15, Leonardo DiCaprio sat down with a pile of rented VHS tapes and gave himself a crash course in movie history. He’d recently, and miraculously, landed his first major movie role, playing opposite Robert De Niro, and figured he’d better brush up on the classics, fast. He watched film after film, but no performance awed him more than the one James Dean gave in Elia Kazan’s 1955 East of Eden, as Cal Trask, the rebellious son of a disapproving, rigidly principled, Bible-thumping father. Craving attention, he’s a cutup, a jittery post-adolescent clown, a kid perpetually showing off on the monkey bars; if only his yearning could be seared right out of him, the way a teenager burns off calories. Dean’s Cal is simultaneously self-protective and exposed—the tenderness he needs is elusive, a nameless butterfly heartbeat he can hear in the dark but can’t get close to.