Once I stopped watching Homeland (last year?), I sort of got out of the groove of covering Claire Danes’ interviews. In all honesty, it wasn’t a huge loss for gossip – Claire’s interviews the past few years have been pretty boring and uneventful, so much so that I actually forgot that she’s lived through a few scandals in her day. Claire appeared on Howard Stern’s SiriusXM show yesterday and Stern brought the vintage gossip and drama. I actually learned some stuff about Claire that I didn’t know before, like she turned down the role of Rose in Titanic. Did you know that? I did not. Stern also made Claire talk about the Billy Crudup drama. Vintage scandal recap: Billy Crudup dumped his then-seven-months-pregnant girlfriend, Mary Louise Parker, for Claire. Claire and Billy were costars and she was just 24 and there was some stuff about how she was a “homewrecker,” although to be fair… Crudup got most of the sh-t for that, as he should have. Anyway, here are some highlights from the Stern interview:
Being judged by the public for being a homewrecker: “That was a scary thing. That was really hard. I didn’t know how to not do that. I was just in love with him. And needed to explore that and I was 24… I didn’t quite know what those consequences would be. You never know. But it’s O.K. . . . I went through it.”
They dated for four years & there are no hard feelings: “But it’s okay. I went through it. We’re friendly, we’re friends.”
Why she turned down Titanic after doing Romeo + Juliet: “It seemed redundant.”
She also told Stern that she never hooked up with Jared Leto during or after My So Called Life, mostly because he’s seven years older than her (and she was just a teenager during MSCL). As for the Crudup stuff… I understand what she’s saying about how she just didn’t know how to NOT be in love with him. I can even see how a 24-year-old would have some kind of naiveté about the sh-tstorm that her affair would bring out. But still… once a dude leaves his seven-months-pregnant partner, that is a HUGE red flag for any relationship, even if you weren’t the “other woman” (which Claire completely was). And 24 years old is still very young, but that’s plenty old enough to know that you’re going to get a ton of bad press for having an affair with a dude with a pregnant girlfriend. Ugh. It’s still sort of amazing that Claire managed to get her public profile back on track after that.
Photos courtesy of Getty, WENN.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pLHLnpmirJOdxm%2BvzqZmbW1gaX92e8KlmKKqlZSxorrErJaopo%2BdvK6x1qucnKOZo7Sgrsilo7KXk6fCpcHPmKCYr5GorKvB0q2WoqaPoby3sb6woK2gj522rns%3D