Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes received over audiences with Romeo + Juliet, their fashionable adaptation of William Shakespeare’s most well-known play.
The Titanic star and the Homeland alum performed the titular doomed couple within the 1996 movie, which additionally starred John Leguizamo (Tybalt), Harold Perrineau (Mercutio), Dash Mihok (Benvolio) and Paul Rudd (Dave Paris). Baz Luhrmann directed the film from a screenplay that he wrote with Craig Pearce.
Romeo + Juliet cemented DiCaprio’s standing as a heartthrob, however he didn’t land the position with out proving himself first. “When I saw Leonardo, I thought, ‘God, that’s how he should look. But can he act?’” Luhrmann recalled to iHeartRadio in August 2016. “Then I found out he was the preeminent young actor.”
The filmmaker revealed that the Oscar winner flew to Australia to audition for the half, and his dedication paid off. “He came down to Australia and he brought all these friends and we made a whole video of the show with the other actors,” he defined. “I won’t say who, it will never be seen; I realized that I couldn’t make it without him.”
Danes, for her half, almost misplaced out on her position to Natalie Portman. The Black Swan star was 14 on the time, whereas DiCaprio was 21, so the My So-Called Life alum was seen as a extra age-appropriate love curiosity for him.
“She’s a really mature girl for her age,” DiCaprio informed Entertainment Weekly of Danes in September 1996. “She was the only girl when we did the audition who came straight in my face to do the lines. She said them looking at me right in the eye. And some of the other girls did, like, the affected flower thing. You know, they stroked their face and looked up and tried to do things with their eyelashes, and it was not nearly as truthful as Claire’s performance.”
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Scroll by way of the gallery under to see the place the celebrities of Romeo + Juliet ended up:
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