Claire Danes on Her ‘Guttural Sob’ Making Romeo + Juliet and the Lesson She Learned From Leonardo DiCaprio: ‘Don’t Eff Around’

Claire Danes is looking back at her early career, filming alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.

Danes, 47, took part in Variety‘s Actors on Actors, published June 13 with Richard Gadd. During the chat, Gadd, 37, told Danes that once, in school, he wrote an essay about 1996’s Romeo + Juliet and Danes’ “amazing guttural sob” after she learned Romeo (DiCaprio) was dead. 

“And then you mastered the guttural sob,” Danes joked of Gadd, who starred in 2024’s Baby Reindeer and  2026’s Half Man. “You saw my guttural sub and you raised it.”

Danes said that she remembered the moment she let out her sob “very distinctly.” She admitted, “I was very surprised by it.” She said that director Baz Luhrmann had created an “epic” environment and the world he had created “helped elicit that feeling.”

Being on the set of the movie — which modernized Shakespeare’s classic tale, including by using guns instead of swords — was overwhelming at times. 

“I remember just kind of blithely playing with the prop gun and putting it to my head and Leo getting very serious and saying like, ‘Claire, we don’t do that. Don’t eff around,’ ” Danes remembered. At the time, Danes was 17 years old and had already starred in My So-Called Life and Little Women. DiCaprio, now 51, was 21, and had starred in This Boy’s Life and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. 

“And he was right, but I was just being a doofus,” Danes said.

Danes, who most recently starred in the miniseries The Beast in Me, said that when she performed her “guttural sob,” she remembered “being startled by my response which is what we hope for,” but noted it doesn’t always happen for actors. 

Gadd said he remembered getting an A on his essay about the sob, and Danes joked, “You’re welcome.”

Danes reflected on how Luhrmann, 63, wanted to make Romeo + Juliet “as accessible as possible” so it had “no pretensions.”

“It was about clarity of intention and language,” she said. “I haven’t done anything like that since then. It was totally thrilling — but I’ve done enough work to know that a well-written scene is just a ride that you are on.”

Romeo + Juliet also starred Paul Sorvino, John Leguizamo, Miriam Margolyes, Harold Perrineau, Paul Rudd and Christina Pickles. It made over $147 million at the box office. It was nominated for only one Oscar, Best Art Direction, but earned seven nods from the BAFTA, winning four, including best direction for Luhrmann. Though reviews of it at the time were more mixed, in the three decades since, it’s come to be considered a classic, in part for the chemistry between Danes and DiCaprio but also for Perrineau’s iconic take on the role of Mercutio. 

A year after the film was released, DiCaprio shot to absolute superstardom when he starred in Titanic. Danes, meanwhile, mostly focused on indie film before switching over to television. She starred in Homeland from 2011 to 2020 and in the 2022 miniseries Fleishman Is in Trouble and the 2023 miniseries Full Circle. 

She said on a 2020 episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard that she had actually been offered the role of Rose in Titanic, but turned it down. “I had just made this romantic epic with Leo in Mexico City, which is where they were going to shoot Titanic,” Danes said. “And I just didn’t have it in me.”

She said that she and DiCaprio were both torn on whether to do the film, and he said yes, but she “really wasn’t ready” for the fame the film would bring. 

“I remember after that movie came out and [DiCaprio] just went into another stratosphere,” she said. For herself, she said, “I think I may have sensed that I was courting that [level of fame] or I was proximate to that. I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want it.”