Rumors swirled on Tuesday, Dec. 1, that Leonardo DiCaprio gets raped by a bear in his upcoming film, The Revenant, after a claim by Drudge Report went viral.
“The new movie features a shocking scene of a wild bear raping Leonardo DiCaprio!” the headline on Drudge Report reads. “The bear flips Leo over and thrusts and thrusts during the explicit mauling. He is raped — twice!”
But Fox, the studio behind the film — which features the Oscar-winning actor, 41, playing real-life frontiersman Hugh Glass and is based on the 2002 novel of the same name, quickly refuted the claim.
“As anyone who has seen the movie can attest, the bear in the film is a female who attacks Hugh Glass because she feels he might be threatening her cubs. There is clearly no rape scene with a bear,” the studio said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly.
Glass, an explorer and fur trapper, was attacked by a bear during an 1823 expedition of the American wilderness and left for dead. The studio maintains that in the attack scene, the female bear is protecting her two cubs.
Earlier this year, DiCaprio spoke to Yahoo Movies about the intense scene.
“Those scenes — amongst many other sequences — were some of the more difficult things I’ve ever had to do in my entire career,” he admitted. “But the end result is going to be one of the most immersive experiences audiences will ever have with what it would be like to come face-to-face with an animal of that magnitude that is incredibly primal. It is absolutely startling and shocking, and it is the closest thing to documentary filmmaking — but in a completely stylized way that a lot of people never experienced.”
The film — which also stars Tom Hardy — hits theaters Christmas Day.
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