The fact that nobody really knows anything about Leonardo DiCaprio is well-established at this point. Indeed, the best joke of Nikki Glaser’s Golden Globes monologue last night revolved around that fact that DiCaprio gives so little of himself away that the only things she could find to joke about him were his notoriously younger girlfriends and an obscure magazine interview he gave when he was 17, where he announced that his favourite food was “pasta, pasta and more pasta”.

However, DiCaprio then went and instantly gave some of himself away. A camera remained on him during a commercial break, and it caught him giving one of the most flamboyant demonstrations of his personality ever seen.

If you missed it, it’s a doozy. The clip seems to show DiCaprio spotting someone from across the auditorium, and giving them a kind of Dramatic Chipmunk look. Putting his fingers to his eyes, he mouths something along the lines of: “I saw you with the K-pop thing.” He then appears to re-enact what this person was like with the K-pop thing, pointing around him with a flourish. He touches his lips. He mimes a moment of realisation. He cracks himself up again so much that he then re-enacts his own re-enactment, with more points and a stage-whispered “K-pop”.

And then, like a cloud drifting across the sun, it ends. Blankly Inscrutable Actor Leonardo DiCaprio comes to the fore once again. He sullenly signs something for someone, and the clip ends.

On TikTok they’re already calling it “2026’s first meme” and it’s obvious why. Especially during his Oscar-chasing years, DiCaprio staunchly made a point of never showing an ounce of personality. He would talk about craft. He’d talk about his love of storytelling. Production videos, where they exist, showed little more than a robotic dedication to technique.

This is, of course, what makes him a movie star. Unlike most of us, who fart out each ambient thought and meal we experience on to social media, DiCaprio values the importance of mystique. He knows that the bulk of what we think of movie star charisma simply consists of the ideas and values that we project on to people, and he wants to give us the widest canvas available.

But the downside of this is that, whenever there’s a momentary slip of the facade and a small chink of the real DiCaprio leaks out, people fall on top of it. Would this much noise have been made had, say, Chris Pratt mouthed something about K-pop at the Golden Globes? No, of course not.

Similarly, had Jack Black pulled a bizarre microexpression during an Actors on Actors video with Jennifer Lawrence, not a single person would have noticed. But when DiCaprio did it this year – answering a question about directors he’d like to work with by narrowing his eyes and giving a sassy little neck snap, before snapping back into character and responding sincerely – it basically halted the internet for an entire week.

You could write entire dissertations about that moment. Did he forget he was being filmed? Was it a private joke? Is it a form of neurological tic? It was a smaller, more demure version of that insane Little Mix accent challenge video from many years ago. If anything, it only deepened the mystery of who Leonardo DiCaprio actually is.

Arguably the first glimpse we got of this side of DiCaprio came during, of all things, a Carpool Karaoke video. James Corden used his guest Jennifer Lopez’s phone to message DiCaprio, asking if he wanted to cut loose. His near-instant reply – “You mean tonight, boo boo? Club wise?” – was a jolt. It felt like the sort of thing that an actor might say, either obliviously or with heightened irony, but Leonardo DiCaprio? Leonardo DiCaprio from Blood Diamond? It didn’t quite fit.

But, look, now it’s out there. DiCaprio has given enough peeks into his actual personality that he might as well just ditch the pretense and keep it up full-time. One Battle After Another already showed that he can be funny, so why not just hang it all out there for everyone to see? Let him gurn and mug and vamp. We don’t need to see him as the serious actor who occasionally grimaces at Lady Gaga any more. He has earned the right to be himself, regardless of how silly that is.

Of course, there is always the possibility that DiCaprio’s next role will be Man Who Fails to Understand the Concept of K-pop in an upcoming hard-hitting drama about the Hallyu phenomenon, and his Golden Globes bit was simply actorly preparation. In which case, congratulations, Leonardo. It’s sure to be a masterpiece.