Five Unforgettable Passengers Remember Life Aboard Titanic

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.’”