Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover of Rolling Stone

So many child stars not only have trouble transitioning to adult stardom, they have trouble transitioning to adulthood period.

Not Leonardo DiCaprio.

The kid who got his start on Growing Pains has always had the talent and as a teenager starred in such provocative movies as Total Eclipse, The Basketball Diaries, This Boys Life and an Oscar-nominated performance in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?

Superstardom came in 1997, when he was just 22, with the phenomenon that was The Titanic.

Instead of losing his way, DiCaprio became more choosy than ever about his projects and worked with top-flight directors such as Martin Scorsese (The Aviator, Gangs of New York, The Departed and Shutter Island), Steven Spielberg (Catch Me if You Can) and Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road). Leo was also nominated for an Academy Award for best actor for his performance in Blood Diamond directed by Edward Zwick.

His latest collaboration is with director Christopher Nolan in Inception which opened at number one at the box office last weekend. Taking in $62 million in its first three days, the film was the biggest opening of Leo’s career!

I met Leo at the Academy Awards nominees luncheon the year he was nominated for Blood Diamond. It was a surreal event for me because I was seated right next to Jennifer Hudson and Leo and Mark Wahlberg were at the next table.

Then about a year later, I made a late night stop at the Taco Bell near Beverly Center and Leo was there with two female friends. He was low-key and not drawing attention to himself but when a couple of employees asked him to pose for pictures with them, he happily obliged.

He’s someone who seems comfortable with his stardom but whose main priority is being an actor.

But this does not mean he does not have anxious moments: “[My stomach churns over] really stupid stuff,” DiCaprio reveals in the new Rolling Stone cover story. “Things that shouldn’t make you anxious whatsoever. It’s crazy how your mind will become this database to make you worry about things that are so arbitrary. I have a well-organized life, and I’ve put a lot of thought into the things that I do, and then, you know, my stomach will be…I’ll just be sitting there, totally anxious about something ridiculous.”

More excerpts:

On growing up:
“I was essentially a dwarf with the biggest mouth in the world. I would talk back to anyone and be up for any fight, and when you tell a kid that’s three years older than you to shove it, you’re going to get your ass beat…I was a real punk, there’s no question about it.”

On partying in the pre-TMZ age:
“I got to be wild and nuts, and I didn’t suffer as much as people do now, where they have to play it so safe that they ruin their credibility. I didn’t care what anyone thought…. It was also about avoiding the tornado of chaos, of potential downfall. It was, ‘Wow, how lucky are we to not have hung out with that crowd or done those things?’ My two main competitors in the beginning, the blond-haired kids I went to audition with, one hung himself and the other died of a heroin overdose… . I was never into drugs at all. There aren’t stories of me in a pool of my own vomit in a hotel room on the Hollywood Strip.”

On dating:
“I had better success meeting girls before Titanic. My interactions with them didn’t have all the stigma behind it, not to mention there wasn’t a perception of her talking to me for only one reason.”

On dealing with his Titanic fame:
“It was like there was a separate entity out there,” he says. “Not to use a James Cameron reference, but it was like being in a little bit of an avatar.” He cringes. “That’s going to sound extremely self- indulgent. It’s going to sound like, ‘Oh, I was a frickin’ avatar,’ give me a break, I’m already vomiting.”