It’s been 20 years, but Alex Owens-Sarno can still taste the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Leonardo DiCaprio shared with her. Danny Nucci delights in the memory of Kate Winslet goofing on an American Valley Girl accent. Jason Berry still has the sweater he sported in steerage. None could have imagined that Titanic would be the most momentous moviemaking experience of their careers, but it was. It really was.
Titanic was a fraught production. Pre-release press predicted it would, like the ocean liner, sink. The rest is cinema history: the film has grossed just over $2 billion worldwide. It played for almost a year during its original run; the home-video release came out while it was still in theaters. It was the biggest box-office hit of all time until 2010, when James Cameron’s own Avatar supplanted it. The epic tied a record for Oscar wins, 11, including best picture and best director. And just this week, the Library of Congress inducted it into the National Film Registry of films deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Having a role in a film like Titanic does away with the “verbal résumé” conversation character actors are often subjected to, in which the questioner tries to determine where they’ve seen the performer. “Since 1997, all I have to say is, ‘Did you see Titanic?’” says Nucci, who played Jack Dawson’s traveling companion Fabrizio, with a laugh. “Conversation’s done.”
On the 20th anniversary of the film’s theatrical christening, Vanity Fair sought out the actors who played some of this epic love story’s most cherished characters who weren’t Jack and Rose. They were ready to go back to Titanic.
Amy Gaipa (Trudy)
Amy Gaipa was in an acting program at New York’s Circle in the Square when she landed the role of Rose’s devoted maid. “It was always Trudy,” she says. “My final callback was with James Cameron, but I did not know that until he opened the door to the room. At one point, three quarters through the casting session, he said, ‘I’m thinking about you for the woman who lays in the bed with her two children.’ I said, ‘Oh no, I’m pretty attached to Trudy.’ I don’t know where the bravado came from. I was pretty determined. . . . I wanted to wear a beautifully crisp apron and the little bonnet in my hair. I was totally into the costume.”
Gaipa, who is currently filming an independent project in New York, had “a lovely time” with Winslet. “Every once in a while we would be in the makeup room together. At one point, she said, ‘You’re a good egg.’ . . . The staircase scene [at the end] was just magical. Seeing [Rose] meet Jack on the steps and the camera panning across the characters that were part of her life—that was a cool moment for all of us. There was an electricity in the room.”
Making one’s feature-film debut on a project as huge as Titanic was akin to being thrown in the deepest waters. “The first day of shooting, it dawned on me in the middle of a take that I’m actually making this movie,” Gaipa says with a laugh. “I knew my lines cold . . . but I saw cables over here and the crew over there, and all of a sudden everything flew out of my head. They yelled, ‘Cut.’ Kate came over and gave me a big hug and said, ‘You just realized you’re making a movie, right?’”
Gaipa had no inkling Titanic would become the biggest box-office hit all time. “But I do have to say that when I first arrived on the set with the etiquette coach, she said, ‘You might never work on another film this big again.’ I said, ‘This is my first film; you can’t tell me that,’ and we laughed. . . . The day we did the biggest crowd scene, and we were going up the gangplank to the ship. I was thinking, ‘Wow, maybe that woman was right.’ But I’m still trying. There’s another one out there for me, I know it.”
Jason Barry (Tommy Riley)
Jason Barry was living what he calls the Withnail & I existence in London when he got the call to meet with a casting director putting actors on tape for Titanic. “I lived in a crummy little bed-sit with the pay phone in the hall,” the Dublin native recalls. “It was the typical actor’s life.”
He did not know James Cameron was involved until a follow-up call. “It was great,” Barry says. “I spent probably a half hour with him. He asked me to do a bit of improv. I’m not 100 percent sure of what I did, but I do remember talking about potatoes.” On that same pay phone, Barry got the call that he had landed the role.
Barry was told he would be filming for six months in Mexico. “I think everybody had the sense that this was as big as it gets,” he says. “The first day I got on set, there was this huge water tank, and I’m thinking, ‘This is nuts.’”
Lasting friendships were made with, among others, Billy Zane, who played the film’s villain, haughty Cal. Zane offered encouraging words during the scene in which Barry’s character dies after being shot in the chest, saying he’d heard that Cameron was very impressed with how the scene went. “That was a nice thing to be told,” Barry says. “I’ve seen him quite a bit, actually, since the film. Billy’s a great lad.”
When Titanic was first released, Barry got recognized a lot, especially on return trips to Dublin to visit his parents: “Because the character was Irish, the Irish press and public really took to Tommy Ryan, the character.”
He’s worked steadily in film and television since, though he’s a little less recognizable; Barry started running marathons and lost weight, along with the “ridiculous curly hair” he sported in the film. But on a recent visit home, he found a memento of his Titanic experience: his character’s signature sweater in the bottom of a drawer. “I must have given it to my mom,” he says. “I just think about the time that’s past and the fact that the film is still regarded as a masterpiece. It’s crazily wonderful to think of life since, but also to have those fantastic memories.”
Jenette Goldstein (Irish Mom)
“He’s great,” Goldstein says of James Cameron. “He’s a loyal person and very creative. He assumes if you are an actor you don’t just want to do the the same thing over and over again.” Cameron first cast the actress as fierce Marine Private First Class Vasquez in Aliens, then as a foster mother in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. “He called me up and said to have a look at the Titanic script,” she recalls, “but that the role of Rose was already taken.”
“Irish Mom” is never identified by name, but she leaves a lasting impression with her pivotal scene, laying on a bed with her two children and telling them a bedtime story as the boat sinks and the waters rise. The script did not specify what story she should tell. Goldstein, who is not Irish, got her inspiration from the production’s resident Irish actors and musicians. “They were lovely,” she said. “One of them said, ‘You have to tell ‘In the Land of Tír na nÓg,’” about a land of eternal youth and beauty. “Another wrote it all out and explained what it meant. It was just a wonderful choice.”
When people ask her about Titanic, they primarily want to know about Cameron, she says: “We’re filming the scene where [the steerage passengers] are being held in third class. There are tons of extras. This little boy, who I think might have been an extra in a McDonald’s commercial, says his line. Jim says, ‘Cut, we’re going again.’ The boy asks, ‘Did I not do good?’ Everyone laughs, but Jim quiets them. He stops productions and he makes his way to the boy, bends down, and in the midst of this high-pressure Hollywood movie, explains how he is going to shoot the scene. That’s the kind of person he is.”
Goldstein—who, unlike her character, does not have red hair—is used to “did we go to high school together?”-style queries from people who know they recognize her from somewhere. But when the film came out, the other kids at her children’s school clamored for her autograph. “I know it was because of my one degree of separation from Leo and Kate,” she says with a laugh.
She is presently an entrepreneur, the founder of Jenette Bras, a chain of high-end bra-fitting boutiques for full-busted women. “Forty is the new 60 for women in Hollywood,” she jokes. “I was doing a lot of guest-starring roles on television but I’m a creative person and I just wanted to do more. . . . Now that the business has been successful, my mind is drifting back to acting or creating a project.”
Alex Owens-Sarno (Cora)
When her elementary-school classmates would bring teen magazines with Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover to school, Owens-Sarno could tell them, “I know him—he’s my friend.” She was 7 when she was cast in Titanic as Cora, the adorable moppet in steerage who dances with Jack Dawson and earns his assurance, “You’re still my best girl, Cora.”
“I can’t dance,” the 29-year-old confesses now. “That was straight-up a little kid getting thrown around.”
Accompanied by their mother and uncle, Owens-Sarno and her 3-and-a-half year-old sister answered an open casting call in Rosarito, Mexico, where Cameron had constructed an oceanside movie set. “My mother was talking about the Titanic and how many people died, and my sister started crying,” the San Diego native recalls. “Molly Flynn, the casting director, was walking by and said, ‘Get that kid into a costume.’ . . . Then she said that I was cute, and would I like to try out (for Cora)? I got in line behind 10 little blonde girls. I got the call a week later.”
“The sweetest” is how she describes DiCaprio. “I was really nervous. But he made being on set so comfortable. We did a few scenes together,” including one that was deleted. “All I really remember was that he was so nice. . . . Between takes, I would sit on his lap and he would order peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He would chase my sister around and try to tickle her; big brother stuff.”
Owens-Sarno ended up seeing the movie more than 10 times during its theatrical run. “I got dragged to it so many times,” she said. “Different parts of my family wanted to see it with me. Friends wanted to see it with me. It was just this phenomenon.”
Friends still call her Cora. (“They know it annoys me.”) Online, guys try to pull a Jack Dawson—but, to her great amusement, they end up misquoting the line: “You’re still my girl,” or “You’re still my best.” She also gets fan letters from as far as Europe and Russia. ”Some of them aren’t in English,” she says. “It shows the huge impact the movie has had around the world.”
Acting is still her passion; Owens-Sarno performs improv and sketch comedy, and just launched a production company, Jerk Buddy Productions. “I can’t imagine doing anything else,” she says. “It’s what I’ve loved my whole life.”
Danny Nucci (Fabrizio)
Danny Nucci totally gets it now, but he was “completely heartbroken” at Titanic’s premiere. The bulk of his scenes had been cut from the film. “The first time I saw it, that was the predominant part of the experience,” he says. “When I saw it the second time, I was able to see the scope of what Jim had done. . . . It was pretty amazing.”
Consigned to the cutting-room floor was Nucci’s original death scene, which was even more dramatic than his death-by-smokestack demise in the film. In it, he survives the sinking and swims to the lifeboat carrying Zane’s character, Cal. Fabrizio pleads that he has to get to America. Cal smacks him over the head with an oar and says, “It’s that way.” “As I float away, the lifeboat slowly [disappears] into the gray,” Nucci recalls. “It was one of the scenes that drew me to the role. But after seeing the movie, I understand, because it’s just on and on with Cal. We get it; Cal is awful.”
Nucci’s big scene that did make the cut is the iconic “king of the world” moment with DiCaprio. “It was just me and him up on this giant platform, and the wind was blowing and it was freezing cold and it was the morning, and I don’t think we’d eaten,” Nucci recalls. “I had to pee, he had to pee; he’s hungry, I’m hungry; he’s cold, I’m cold. We don’t have anything up there other than our characters’ clothes. And so in this scene, [our characters] are the happiest we have ever been in our lives, and the world is in front of us, and the minute they said, ‘Cut,” we would be miserable.”
Nucci, currently co-starring on the hit Freeform series The Fosters, gives Cameron full props for the director’s own “king of the world” moment at the Academy Awards. He was criticized for hubris in some circles, but Nucci, again, understands. If you believed the press at the time of filming, he explains, “we were making Heaven’s Gate, the biggest and most expensive bomb in history. But while we were filmmaking, we were all, ‘It seems like it’s good.’ So to have what Jim went through and for him to have that moment was really special. . . . His passion for detail is sometimes maddening, but it produced the film we’re talking about 20 years later.”
