It’s been 84 years since the raging debate about Jack Dawson’s fate in Titanic (opens in new tab) was ignited.
Okay, it has actually been 25 years – with the movie celebrating its quarter century birthday this week – but it feels like the question of whether Leonardo DiCaprio (opens in new tab)‘s character would have fit on the floating door will never truly be answered. Will we still be talking about it when we’re Rose’s age at the start of the movie? Probably.
Many things have happened in the last twenty five years – iPhones, Game of Thrones (opens in new tab), several royal weddings – but Titanic fans still can’t make their minds up.
Over the years, Leo has been asked for his thoughts on it all but has remained tight lipped about his opinion.
Back in 2019, host Joshua Horowitz was interviewing Leo alongside Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt while they starred in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
He asked for the Wolf of Wall Street star’s verdict on door gate, and while Margot expressed her sadness at watching Jack float to the bottom of the ocean, Leo smiled as he refused to answer, stating: “No comment.”
Kate Winslet has also been asked about it previously, and she once told Jimmy Kimmel that Jack ‘could have actually fit on that bit of door’.
However, when Horowitz showed her the clip of Leo refusing to comment during an interview for the Happy Sad Confused podcast, she laughed: “I don’t f**king know. No, that’s the answer is that I don’t f**king know.
“All I can tell you is I do have a decent understanding of water and how it behaves, I really do. If you put two adults on a standup paddle board, it becomes immediately extremely unstable, that is for sure.
“I actually don’t believe that we would have survived if we had both gotten on that door. I think that he could have fit, but it would have tipped and it would not have been a sustainable idea.”
Director James Cameron also wants to put the debate to bed once and for all. Last week, he told The Toronto Sun: “We have done a scientific study to put this whole thing to rest and drive a stake through its heart once and for all.
“We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from the movie.’
He added that the experiment used “two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo”, continuing: “We put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived.
“Only one could survive.”
Well, that’s that.
For now, anyway…