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Key Points Claire Danes recalls awkwardness kissing Jared Leto at age 14 on set. She felt safe due to supportive adults, despite controversial age gap. My So-Called Life struggled ratings-wise but became highly influential and earned Danes a Golden Globe. Back in 1994, Jared Leto’s Jordan Catalano was every teenager’s ultimate heartthrob, including, apparently, his costar. Claire Danes, who was just 14 when she played Angela Chase in My So-Called Life, recently opened up about what it was really like kissing her 21-year-old scene partner. Danes, now 46, admitted that their intimate scenes were “a little awkward,” in an interview with The Guardian published on October 31. RELATED: Who Is Claire Danes’ Husband? All About Hugh Dancy, Law & Order Star and Her Longtime Love “I had barely kissed a boy and here I was making out with this Adonis, and I didn’t even know how to interpret the stage directions,” Danes explained. “Like it said I was supposed to kiss his face, and I did not know what that meant. I didn’t know that there was any other terrain that one could explore.” The mom of three continued, “Two months later, what I was exploring as Angela would suddenly become personally relevant to me,” and described being a teenager as “is so Kafka-esque. It’s a really wild ride, and there I was, having a parallel one as a fictional self.” These days, the age gap between a 14-year-old and a 21-year-old would never fly, but Danes said that she was lucky enough to be on a set with “bona fide benevolent grownups, so it was a very solid, sane environment.” When asked if she thought it was a good thing that sort of casting likely wouldn’t happen today, she replied, “I really don’t know. We might, would we not? I honestly don’t know what my moral stance on that is. Maybe because it just was my experience, and I felt safe.” While My So-Called Life may have made Danes a star, at the time, it wasn’t exactly a hit. The 1994 teen drama earned raves from critics for its painfully real look at adolescence, but it struggled to find an audience on ABC. The show aired opposite Friends, which was essentially a scheduling death sentence for anything new, and never quite caught on in the ratings. RELATED: Does Jared Leto Have a Girlfriend? All About His Romances With His A-List Exes Still, what My So-Called Life lacked in viewers, it more than made up for in influence. Danes’ performance as Angela Chase became the blueprint for every angsty, intelligent TV teen who followed, from Freaks and Geeks to Dawson’s Creek, and even nabbed her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Series – Drama.
