Leonardo DiCaprio Hasn't Acted in a Movie Directed by a Woman in 2 Decades

​The actor David Oyelowo has almost certainly completed a historic cinematic streak: four movies in a row directed by women. That's right: Four. Whole. Films. Followed not long after by a fifth. In an industry where many male stars rarely, if ever, work with female directors.

"For me, it's completely selfish, actually, because some of the best directors working today are women," says Oyelowo, the star of Ava DuVernay's Selma. His streak hasn't happened by accident. 

"I've had to actively pursue working with female filmmakers," he says. Only about 2 percent of the top 100 films of 2014 were directed by women, according to a study by USC — a fact so blatantly awful that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has launched a formal investigation into Hollywood discrimination.​

"It is a tragedy and a travesty," Oyelowo says, but he's trying to use his influence to do something about it. Even though he is not yet at the very top of the Hollywood food chain, he believes his reputation gives him the ability to help filmmakers like DuVernay, Mira Nair (The Queen of Katwe), Cynthia Mort (Nina), Maris Curran (Five Nights in Maine), and Amma Asante (A United Kingdom) get their films made. "We can complain about inclusion or diversity or all these words that have now become buzz phrases," Oyelowo says, "but if you have the ability to do anything about it and you don't, you are part of the problem."​

Despite 2015's Katniss (Mockingjay - Part 2) and Rey (Star Wars: The Force Awakens), actresses played only 22 percent of the lead roles in 2015's top 110 films: 50 percent of the protagonists in films directed by women; and just 13 percent of the protagonists in films directed by men.

Over the past few years, such sobering statistics, assembled by USC, San Diego State University, and the Directors Guild of America, with help from the Sundance Institute and others, have became so painfully obvious that there's no disputing the fact of discrimination. The industry, after decades of activism, much of it by female filmmakers themselves, is now scrambling for solutions and investigating causes, overt and otherwise. Yet the leading men who have thrived in Hollywood have barely taken a speaking part in this debate. (Interview requests to 10 leading actors were met with silence or polite rejections from their publicists.) 

To get a clearer picture of the working relationship between leading men and female directors, Cosmopolitan.com collected some basic data: We compiled a list of the top-grossing 100 leading men in Hollywood and simply counted how many films they have acted in with female and male directors. (We counted only films released by publication time, and included bit parts, tiny roles, and animated voices — anything except un-credited cameos; for more info, see note below.*) 

The results

Of the top 100 leading men in Hollywood, 20 have never worked on a single film with a female director. Actors include: Ben Stiller, Matt Damon, Jonah Hill, Dwayne Johnson, Orlando Bloom, Tobey Maguire, Vin Diesel, and Chris Hemsworth.  ​

Of the top 100 leading men in Hollywood, 21 have worked with a female director once. Among those, Brad Pitt has only acted in his wife Angelina Jolie's By the Sea. Will Smith and Hugh Jackman have only done animated voices in Shark Tale and Happy Feet, respectively, which featured female co-directors. ​​ ​

In sum, about 40 percent of Hollywood's top 100 leading men have worked with a female film director once or less.​ Another 40 percent have worked with a female director just two or three times. 

(It's worth emphasizing here that DiCaprio isn't among the worst offenders. Given his stature and the fact that he's likely to win his first Oscar this year, however, it's important he do better.)

The remaining 20 percent shows improvement. ​At the top end of the spectrum, Paul Giamatti has acted in nine films with a female director, followed by Keanu Reeves, who's acted in eight, and Ralph Fiennes and Mark Ruffalo, who have each acted in seven​.

Beyond the top 100, actors like Jason Bateman (36 film credits), Kevin Hart (32), Joaquin Phoenix (29), Ryan Gosling (20), Nicholas Hoult (17), and Zac Efron (17) also have zero credits with female directors. ​

The explanations

One likely reason some older actors — Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, Sean Connery, Sylvester Stallone — have never been directed by women is simple: The number of women directing in Hollywood used to be even worse. In 1979, six women called "The Original Six" formed the Directors Guild of America's Women's Steering Committee. Soon after, they reported that women directors accounted for just 0.05 percent of the total days worked by DGA members between 1949 and 1979. The subsequent threat of a class-action lawsuit immediately led to women working 16 percent of total work days by 1995, according to activist and director Maria Giese, whose complaint to the ACLU led to the current federal investigation.

Overall, it appears that leading men are generally less likely to work with female directors in their peak salary years. Mark Wahlberg hasn't acted in a film with a woman director since Penny Marshall gave him his first film role in 1994's Renaissance Man. Nicolas Cage hasn't acted in a film directed by a woman since Martha Coolidge gave him his first lead role in 1983's low-budget Valley Girl. Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr., Adam Sandler, Denzel Washington, and Bruce Willis have not acted in a film directed by a woman in over two decades. 

"[One] root of this is probably salaries: the fact that most male actors make more money than their female counterparts, plus the trend that the female directors who do work make 'smaller' movies," says producer Alicia Van Couvering (Tiny Furniture, Cop Car, Drinking Buddies). "Men get used to making money on more and bigger movies" — and so they stop working with female directors, whose budgets are typically less than those of men.

A few caveats: Actors can do more than appear in a female director's film to support women in Hollywood. Many of these leading men have, in fact, supported and collaborated with countless female producers, executives, screenwriters, and actresses. Some have acted for female directors on television, produced films directed by women, directed scripts by women, and cofounded film companies with women.

To pick three examples among many, Tom Cruise, who's never acted for a female director, cofounded the spectacularly successful Cruise/Wagner Productions (Mission: Impossible, Minority Report, etc.) with producer Paula Wagner. Brad Pitt cofounded Plan B Entertainment; the company's co-president is Dede Gardner, and together they've coproduced films by Jolie, Rebecca Miller, and DuVernay. Redford hasn't acted with a female director, but he founded the Sundance Institute, which, among other things, cofunded some of the studies that are impacting the EEOC hearings.

Also, the statistics for female actresses aren't fifty-fifty either, given the industry dominance of male directors. For instance, Melissa McCarthy's 22 film credits are all in movies directed by men — and Julia Roberts hasn't starred in a film directed by a woman since her debut, Satisfaction. (Her second will be Jodie Foster's Money Monster, opening this spring.) However, the stats are generally better for Hollywood's top women than men: Jennifer Lawrence (four of 18), Cate Blanchett (six of 43), Sandra Bullock (six of 43), Scarlett Johansson (five of 41), Meryl Streep (six of 54).

Cosmopolitan.com also pulled data on this year's 20 Academy Award acting nominees (including supporting actors). The male actors have 485 total film credits — 29 with female directors, or about 6 percent. The actresses have 326 total credits — 45 with female film directors, or about 14 percent.

The bottom line

Does this data prove that Hollywood's biggest males stars are sexist or outright unwilling to work with women? No. But it does indicate that the actors with the most considerable power to get films made aren't going out of their way to get films made with women at the helm.

"Nobody can tell me Leo hasn't heard about the fact that 2 percent of the top features are directed by women," says Lexi Alexander, director of Green Street Hooligans and Punisher: War Zone. "If you have green-light power and you're not being sure you're directed by a woman, you're making a deliberate choice."

Many actors now have their own smaller production companies to direct work for themselves — but often don't consider female filmmakers. "If actors are producers, or if the film is basically being mounted on the back of their name," says Oyelowo, "I'm sure a lot of them just haven't thought, I wonder if there are any great female directors who could lend their voice? … It takes conscious thought to break down barriers."           

"I have been flat-out told, in some cases, that the actors want a guy directing," says Catherine Hardwicke, director of Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown, Twilight, and more, who recently testified for seven hours in EEOC discrimination hearings. "Though," she says too, "different agents for female actresses have flat-out admitted their clients don't want to work with women too." Films with male directors are often considered "bigger or sexier."

Still, Hardwicke has a request for leading men in particular: When male actors and their teams option a story or set up a project, "and you make a list of possible directors, don't just say it's automatically going to be a guy and do not just put one female's name on the list and 20 guys," she says. "Just make sure that your list is fifty-fifty. Look at their work, take the time to meet with them and hear their take. What we're asking for is just a chance to be there at the table. Just a chance. Because if you go in there and pitch your case, good things can happen."

And not just for the executives, but for the actors. I asked David Oyelowo what he's gotten out of working with women, what he'd tell to the actors who have never worked with a female director:

"I know those guys have missed out on something," he says. "We've all seen those careers, where an actor is on a hamster wheel, churning out similar performances and doing similar kinds of roles. I can almost guarantee that some of their best performances have not been realized because they haven't varied the gaze that they have been under as an actor."

"You can have the same piece that's directed by a veteran male white director and give that same piece to a fresh, female director of color and of course it's going to be completely different," he says. "If movies are about the expression of humanity, and that's largely being seen not only through one gender but through one racial demographic, then the world is definitely poorer for it, and actors are definitely poorer for it too."       

*A note on how Cosmopolitan.com tallied the numbers: We began with BoxOfficeMojo's list of the highest grossing actors in Hollywood. Then we deleted anyone who was not alive or better known as a supporting actor. We then used IMDB listings for each living actor to calculate their total number of films directed by men and women. We included animated films. We excluded shorts, television, "uncredited" roles, and any film not released in theaters before Feb. 19, 2016. If a film had at least one woman as a director, we counted that as one whole film with a female director, even if it was directed by multiple people. For anthology feature films with multiple directors, we counted it as one film directed by a man or woman, depending on who directed the actor's particular segment.

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