Leonardo DiCaprio, an environmental activist outside of his acting career, said that Adam McKay’s newest film Don’t Look Up presents an unparalleled take on climate change. “We’d all been wanting to get the message out there about the climate crisis, and Adam really cracked the code with creating this narrative,” DiCaprio told reporters on Sunday night at the Netflix film’s premiere at The Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.
The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as two low-level astronomers who must travel to the U.S. and attempt to inform the population about a planet-killing comet heading towards the earth. The film mirrors to what scientists do today to warn the world about climate change.
“It’s really hard to reinvent the wheel as far as articulating the science of climate crisis, but what he did here was create a sense of urgency,” DiCaprio said. “We all wanted to be a part of a movie that, from an artistic standpoint, I think shifted the paradigm and made us start having conversations hopefully in a different type of way.”
Jennifer Lawrence stated that one of her biggest struggles while filming was losing a tooth.
“I lost a tooth pretty early in the filming,” Lawrence said, claiming that one of her veneers fell off. “And I couldn’t go to the dentist until the end of the movie, so I had to film most of the movie toothless.”
McKay told Variety that he wanted to respect the film’s science as much as possible. In order to accomplish that, McKay hired astronomer Dr. Amy Mainzer as the film’s science advisor. Mainzer, who studies potentially hazardous asteroids, expressed an optimistic view of climate change.
“The important message to take away from this movie is that all is not lost, it is not hopeless,” Mainzer said. “Climate change can be tackled, we just have to do the basic legwork to get the job done.”
Don’t Look Up will be released December 10 in select theaters, and will begin streaming on Netflix December 24.
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