Claire Danes received a stern warning on set from a future Oscar winner.
In her Variety Actors on Actors conversation with Baby Reindeer’s Richard Gadd, Claire reminisced about making Romeo + Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio at just 17.
She told a story where she tried to lighten the mood on set by playing with the firearm prop, until the Titanic actor stepped in. They were filming the moment where Juliet finds Romeo dead by poison and shoots herself.
“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 explained. “He was right, but I was just being a doofus and a girl.”
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Richard Gadd, who was promoting his new HBO show Half Man, told the Homeland star that he wrote an essay at school about the “guttural sob” that Danes’ character lets out when she finds Romeo dead.
“I remember that moment very distinctly,” she responded. “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.”
Romeo + Juliet saw Baz Luhrmann adapt and highly stylized Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy for the big screen. At the time, per Far Out Magazine, it was rumored that Leo and Claire didn’t get along, as he found the actress “uptight” and she didn’t like his pranks.
While they have never spoken about the feud, The Beast In Me star admitted to W Magazine that she had a crush on her co-star, who was 21 years old at the time. “That was problematic. I couldn’t really have a crush on the guy I was professionally having a crush on,” she said.
“There was definitely a spark, but I don’t think either of us knew how to handle it,” Claire later told Glamour about her time on set. “So, we sometimes sort of ignored each other. It was too big for us to really accept.”
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