Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio’s A-List Competition for ‘Titanic’

The Oscar-winning film almost looked very different, with several other actors, including Gwenyth Paltrow and Matthew McConaughey, in the running for the lead roles.
The only pairing more iconic in the 1990s than Titanic’s Rose DeWitt Bukater and Jack Dawson were the actors behind the characters, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.

And if it weren’t for Winslet herself, that perfect casting may not have happened. “I closed the script, wept floods of tears and said, ‘Right, I’ve absolutely got to be a part of this. No two ways about it,’” the actress told Rolling Stone in 1998.

She set off on a mission: She called her agent and asked for director James Cameron’s phone number. “He was on the freeway, and he said, ‘I’m going somewhere,’” she recalled. “And I think he pulled over, and I said, ‘I just have to do this, and you are really mad if you don’t cast me.’”

Fortunately, it was that precise spirit that sold Cameron on Winslet as Rose — and she booked the role.

Winslet fought for DiCaprio to be cast as Jack

But Winslet wasn’t done. She was convinced DiCaprio was the perfect Jack to her Rose, so she pretty much stalked him at the Cannes Film Festival, sneaking out of a press conference and cornering him at his hotel. “I was thinking, ‘I’m going to persuade him to do this, because I’m not doing it without him, and that’s all there is to it,’” she remembered. “‘I will have him.’ Because he is f*****g brilliant. He’s a f*****g genius, and that was absolutely why.”

And so the duo of Winslet and DiCaprio became known to the world as Rose and Jack in the blockbuster hit, which opened on December 19, 1997, and went on to gross $2.19 billion worldwide.

“Titanic was very much an experiment for Kate Winslet and I,” DiCaprio told Deadline in 2016. “We’d done all of these independent movies. I loved her as an actress and she said, ‘Let’s do this together, we can do this.’ We did it, and it became something that we could’ve never foreseen.”

But the iconic silver screen couple — who teamed up again for 2008’s Revolutionary Road — almost didn’t come to be. Here’s who else was up for consideration for key roles in Titanic:

Gwyneth Paltrow was one of the final choices for Rose

The daughter of actress Blythe Danner and producer/director Bruce Paltrow, Gwyneth Paltrow had already been in more than a dozen films before Titanic came out. Despite her mother’s wishes, she spilled that she was up for the Rose role.

“My mother will kill me that I’m talking about turning down movie roles,” she said on Howard Stern. “She says it’s not ladylike.”

But she did go on to say, “I know that the story is that I turned it down. I think I was really in contention for it — I was one of the last two.”

She added that she “couldn’t change the past” before musing about the big picture. “I look back at the choices I’ve made and think, ‘Why the hell did I say yes to that? And no to that?’ And you know, you look at the big picture and think: There’s a universal lesson here. What good is it to hold onto roles?”
Claire Danes was also one of the top choices for Rose but ultimately turned it down because she had just starred in 1997’s Romeo + Juliet with DiCaprio and didn’t want a repeat.

“I was really clear about it, I wasn’t conflicted,” Danes said on the Armchair Expert podcast about her decision to turn down the role. “I was feeling eager to have different creative experiences and that felt like a repeat and it was going to propel me towards something that I knew I didn’t have the resources to cope with.”

But Paltrow and Danes weren’t the only big names considered. Other actresses who reportedly turned down the role, according to IMDb, include Drew Barrymore, Rose Byrne, Geena Davis and Nicole Kidman. Among those who allegedly went in for an audition were Angelina Jolie, Madonna and Charlize Theron.

And the list of famous actresses who also reportedly had their names in the ring reads like a list of Hollywood royalty: Jennifer Aniston, Kate Beckinsale, Christina Applegate, Neve Campbell, Jennifer Connelly, Cameron Diaz, Minnie Driver, Jodie Foster, Keri Russell, Winona Ryder, Uma Thurman and Rachel Weisz.

Matthew McConaughey auditioned for Jack alongside Winslet

Following his breakthrough roles in 1993’s Dazed and Confused and 1996’s A Time to Kill, Matthew McConaughey was in high demand. And when the opportunity to star in Titanic came along, he was all in. “I went and auditioned for that. I wanted that,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I auditioned with Kate Winslet. Had a good audition. Walked away from there pretty confident that I had it.”

But he never got the call. “I didn’t get it,” he said. “I never got offered that.”