Claire Danes got some very valuable advice from a future Oscar winner.
In her Variety Actors on Actors conversation with “Half Man” star Richard Gadd, the “The Beast in Me” performer reminisced about shooting 1996’s “Romeo + Juliet” with Leonardo DiCaprio. While the shoot — like the film — was emotionally intense, Danes, at 17, tried to lighten the mood by playing with an onset firearm just before shooting her death scene. (Juliet, finding Romeo dead by self-inflicted poison, sobs and shoots herself in the head.) “I remember just blithely playing with the prop gun and putting it to my head, and Leo getting very serious and saying, ‘Claire, we don’t do that. Don’t eff around,’” Danes recalls. “He was right, but I was just being a doofus and a girl.”
Safety with prop firearms has received new attention in the years since the tragic onset shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in 2021 on the set of the film “Rust.” And DiCaprio — who’s worked with guns in films like “The Revenant” and “The Departed” — was already aware of taking special caution even in his Romeo days. DiCaprio, 21 during the shoot, was already a seasoned pro, having received an Oscar nomination for “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” but Danes was no slouch, having led the ABC drama “My So-Called Life” and earned an Emmy nomination. The emotional intensity of the shoot was perhaps new for her, though, and it brought something out of Danes: Gadd told her that he’d written a school essay on her “guttural sob” she lets out upon finding Romeo’s body. (Better still, Gadd got a good grade.) “I remember that moment very distinctly,” Danes says. “I was surprised by it. And the environment was so epic that Baz [Luhrmann] had created. I was moved by the mise en scène, in a way, and the tragedy — but the world he creates helped elicit that feeling.”
Danes, famously, joined “Romeo + Juliet” as a replacement; 14-year-old Natalie Portman, who’d been cast in the role at first, was deemed to read too young on camera opposite her adult male costar. And while her career — with multiple Emmy wins for “Homeland” and now a much-touted lead on a Netflix hit — has been one to envy, fans of her pairing with DiCaprio may wonder what might have been. In a 2020 interview, Danes revealed that she’d been pursued to play Rose in “Titanic” but told producers she couldn’t do it. “I was really clear about it, I wasn’t conflicted,” she said then. “I was feeling eager to have different creative experiences and that felt like a repeat and it was going to propel me towards something that I knew I didn’t have the resources to cope with.”
Read the full Variety Actors on Actors between Danes and Gadd here or watch it now at CNN.com/Watch or on the CNN app.