Leonardo DiCaprio hopes for more climate action with new film

Star actor, Leonardo DiCaprio has revealed that he signed up for Netflix’s star-studded film ‘Don’t Look Up’, because it was an urgent analogy for the climate crisis.

The film is about a comet threatening to wipe out life on Earth.

A dark satire that Looks Up stars DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as astronomers who warn the incompetent president of a starkly partisan and divided United States of an imminent catastrophe.

Just returning from the UN COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow, DiCaprio said Adam McKay’s script solved the “next to impossible” problem of making a suspenseful film about a crisis that “evolves over a century.”

“How do we as a specie, as a society, as a culture, politically, deal with imminent armageddon?” DiCaprio asked a Los Angeles preview screening audience on Thursday.

“He had cracked the code, so to speak, on how to bring all the insanity that we as the human race are responding to this crisis, in a two-hour format,” he said.

The film, scheduled to hit theatres on December 10, stars other celebrities, including Ariana Grande, Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance and Jonah Hill. It’ll begin streaming on Netflix from Christmas Eve.

McKay, known for his work in comedies like “Anchorman” and “Step Brothers” and satirical works “The Big Short” and “Vice”, is one of Hollywood’s most in-demand directors.

DiCaprio also revealed that he hoped the film would “start to create different conversations, and more people talking about it will push the private sector and the powers that be to make massive change.”

However, he admitted he had “not much” optimism about humanity’s ability to resolve the climate crisis.

“Especially after coming back from Glasgow and seeing these commitments that can be changed by the next wacky administration that might come in and pull out,” he warned.

Almost 200 nations came together on a global deal to combat climate change after two weeks of painful negotiation but fell short of what science says is needed to contain dangerous temperature rises.

The planet has “such a limited amount of time, and there’s such a massive scale that needs to happen so quickly,” said DiCaprio.

“And if we don’t do something, we know the outcome. We know the outcome.”

Guardian/Hauwa Abu