The actor who inspired Felicity Jones’ career: “I use him as a bit of a benchmark”

Posted On December 25, 2025December 25, 2025

Let’s take a minute to fully appreciate Felicity Jones for the brilliant actor she is.

She’s a star, sure, but it never feels like she gets the credit she deserves, especially since she’s the emotional core of many great dramas, including The Theory of Everything and The Brutalist, the star of the best Star Wars movie ever (fight me), and she was in a really fun episode of Doctor Who about a giant wasp. That’s an impressive CV.

The English star began her career as a child. She made her first TV appearance at the age of just 13, before landing a major role in the British kids’ series The Worst Witch. She was the ‘worst’ in the sense that she wasn’t very good, not that she committed the most heinous acts. While she was finding her way in the acting world, she was looking across the pond to another young star making waves.

In an interview with Backstage, Jones was asked about the performances that all actors should watch and try to emulate. As she was a teenager in the 1990s, her response shouldn’t have come as a major shock.

“It may sound like an obvious answer, but the person I always come back to for such a collision of emotion and technique is Leonardo DiCaprio,” she said, “I grew up on a very strong diet of Leonardo DiCaprio, from Romeo + Juliet to Titanic. The emotion he brings, but also the skill, is pretty much one of a kind. I use him as a bit of a benchmark. He brings such physicality.”

Similarly to his admirer, DiCaprio also got into the movie business young, since he was also a teenager when he first appeared on television, playing a character in two episodes of The New Lassie, and please don’t ask what happened to the old one. The late 1990s were when he really took off.

Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s greatest love story proved that he could be a leading man, while Titanic’s monstrous success at the box office made him the most famous person on the planet. His performances around this time leaned into his youth and innocence. He was a hopeless romantic who often paid dearly for his naïvety, and everyone loved him for it.

Jones made those comments in 2021. By this point, Leo had also made the likes of The Wolf of Wall Street, The Aviator, The Revenant, and many other films for which he was Oscar-nominated. In terms of characters, these are far more complex challenges than he faced in his youth. You could argue that his roles have become even more diverse since this interview, with the likes of Don’t Look Up and One Battle After Another.

Perhaps it’s nostalgia, or maybe it’s an appreciation of a simpler age, but Jones’s affection for young DiCaprio is undoubtedly an interesting one, and it might seem a little routine, but his performance as Jack Dawson in Titanic is extremely effective. It’s definitely something you should check out if you haven’t already, even if Leo’s never actually bothered to watch it himself.

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