A 'Titanic' Child Star Says a Devastating Scene Was Cut: "Heavily Rejected by Moms"

Any fan of Titanic (so, everyone?) remembers Cora, the little girl who dances with Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack Dawson at that rowdy party for the lower class passengers. And while Cora, who is played by Alex Owens-Sarno, is only in the film briefly, her presense is definitely memorable, particularly because Jack sweetly tells her, "You're still my best girl, Cora." I mean, you can see why this guy was the biggest heartthrob of all time in 1997. They were really laying it on thick.

When Titanic was filmed, Owens-Sarno was only eight years old. Today, she's 36, and in a new interview, she opened up about her time on set and how she was originally going to be featured in more of the movie. It turned out, though, that another scene she filmed was far too upsetting. That's right, too upsetting in a movie that is already about one of the most terrible disasters of all time.

"Our first scene that we filmed was this scene that ended up getting cut, and when we went home that day, my mom was like, ‘Do you know who you were on camera with?’ and I was like, ‘Leo, my friend!’” Owens-Sarno told the After We Wrap podcast (via People). “She literally showed me [What's Eating] Gilbert Grape that week, and I was like, ‘He’s a real actor?!' He was my buddy, and it was super fun.”

The cut scene that Owens-Sarno refers to is one that showed her and her family drowning as the Titanic sank.

"When they were showing test audiences, they were like, ‘Not her. We will not watch her die,'" the actor said. She explained that, “It was heavily rejected by moms" and that viewers thought the scene was "way too much."

The deleted scene is available online, and it is pretty brutal. Cora and her family are shown trapped behind a locked gate in a lower level of the ship as water rushes in around them and they have no way to escape. Owens-Sarno told After We Wrap that filming this scene made her want to be an actor, because of the "heightened emotion" she had to show.

"For me, the thing that really lit me up about the Titanic experience in the realm of acting was actually my drowning scene," she said. "I did my own stunt."

Owens-Sarno, who is still involved in entertainment as an actor, writer, and producer, previously spoke about the deleted scene in a 2020 interview with Vice in which she shared that she was originally going to have a stunt double, before director James Cameron decided that she could handle the scene herself.

“James Cameron was just like, ‘All right, Alex, you’re gonna be completely safe, but I do want you to imagine that Mom and your little sister just died. How does that make you feel?’” Owens-Sarno said. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is horrifying.’ He got me crying, and then we went and did it.”

She also spoke about another, much less traumatic scene that was cut from the movie: One in which she and Jack were drawing together.

"It was the scene that leads up to them being on the deck when Jack shows Rose his drawings for the first time." What they drew was “God above the clouds crying and that was the rain over the Earth. It was really deep, very existential."

Well, we might have missed out on some heavy, emotional content from our favorite child passenger, but we'll always have the dancing.