Leonardo DiCaprio claims he was named after Leonardo da Vinci, so it'd clearly be rude not to play the great Italian polymath if the chance ever came along.
And now it finally has.
Paramount have just beaten out Universal in a seven-figure bidding war for the rights to Walter Isaacson's book on the Renaissance painter, inventor, architect, scientist, mathematician, engineer, botanist, astronomer etc, etc.
The film will be produced by Appian Way, the production company co-founded by DiCaprio, which had a hand in making films such as Shutter Island and The Aviator.
But this, presumably, is the acting opportunity the Oscar winner has truly been waiting for. After all, he has previously claimed that da Vinci is in fact his namesake, as he explained in a 2014 interview with NPR:
"My father tells me that [he and my mother] were on their honeymoon at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, I believe. They were looking at a da Vinci painting, and allegedly I started kicking furiously while my mother was pregnant.
"And my father took that as a sign, and I suppose DiCaprio wasn't that far from da Vinci. And so, my dad, being the artist that he is, said, 'That's our boy's name.'"
It's as if it was written in the stars by Da Vinci himself.
There's currently no date set for the release of the film.
