NEED TO KNOW
Regina Hall still can’t believe that Rose was sound asleep while Jack froze to death after the infamous Titanic sinking.
While promoting her partnership with Bounty, the Girls Trip actress opened up about the eternal debate surrounding Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio’s characters in the 1997 blockbuster’s climax.
“She got up there and got comfortable enough to conk out,” Hall, 54, jokes. “She woke up and was like, ‘Damn, Jack!’ It wasn’t enough. She was sleeping so hard her voice couldn’t wake up. Jack was gone!”
The floating piece of debris has sparked years of controversy on whether or not it could have supported the weight of both star-crossed lovers. But in the eyes of the Scary Movie star, she believes that the duo could have made it work.
“I was like, ‘Rose, you were still in the middle of chaos!’ ” Hall says. “I feel like if she was going to be on the door, at the very least, she should have stayed awake! She could have even lied on top of Jack and let him be on the door!”
The fateful plank that saved Rose but seemingly could not support Jack was not a door at all, actually, but a piece of balsa wood. The dark brown, intricately carved slab was based upon a part of a door frame just above the Titanic’s first-class lounge entrance. The movie prop made history after being sold for nearly one million dollars in 2024.
Cameron, Winslet and DiCaprio have been plagued with the debate since the film’s release in 1997. During a 92NY panel for the advance screening of the movie Lee in 2024, Winslet, 49, admitted that DiCaprio, 50, has probably “got PTSD” from being asked about the viral door moment so many times.
“I thought, ‘He’s busting out the Titanic question and next he’s gonna ask me about the door.’ I absolutely knew it,” Winslet teased while promoting Lee on the Australian talk show The Project in 2024.
Cameron initially dismissed the question in 2019 on air with BBC. “I’ve never really seen it as a debate, it’s just stupid,” the Oscar-winner said. “There’s no debate. But if you really want to unearth all the dumbass arguments associated with it…”
However, Cameron wanted to seek a final answer after all. In 2023, as part of the documentary Titanic: 25 Years Later with James Cameron, the director commissioned a scientific study to determine whether or not survival for both parties was possible. He even hired a team of scientists and two stunt doubles with similar body mass to reenact four different scenarios.
After numerous tests where the stunt doubles were monitored in ice water and asked to maneuver in various positions on the door, the results proved somewhat inconclusive.
“Jack might’ve lived, but there’s a lot of variables,” Cameron said. “I think his thought process was, ‘I’m not gonna do one thing that jeopardizes her.’ “
Of course, for the sake of the story, there was only one option. In an interview with Postmedia per theToronto Sun in 2022, Cameron said that Jack “needed to die.”
“It’s like Romeo and Juliet. It’s a movie about love and sacrifice and mortality,” he said. “The love is measured by the sacrifice.”
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Hall still believes that Rose could have made it work.
“I know Rose loved him, and she was going to choose him even without the money,” she tells PEOPLE. “I don’t know if Rose was exhausted or being passive-aggressive, but Rose didn’t try hard enough.”
