America Ferrara recalled bursting into tears after meeting Leonardo DiCaprio for the first time.
The 39-year-old “Barbie” actress, who is among the nominees at the upcoming Academy Awards, noted that becoming starstruck by other celebrities can “sneak up on you” during a Friday appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”
“More often than not, it’s like someone you had a childhood connection to, right?” Ferrara said. “So it’s always very embarrassing.”
She continued, “I’m debating, like, ‘Do I even want to say this out loud? But, OK.’”
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Ferrara went on to recount meeting her teenage crush DiCaprio, now 49, after she won the best female actor in a comedy series award for her performance in “Ugly Betty” at the 2007 SAG Awards.
“I watched Titanic in the movie theaters seven times,” she recalled. “[I was] 13, 14 [years old], prime time to be in love with Leonardo DiCaprio, right?”
“OK, so first time I went to the SAG Awards, and I had won for ‘Betty,’ I had been onstage and the whole thing,” Ferrera remembered. “I was feeling kind of like, ‘I belong here, this is cool.'”
“And then Leonardo DiCaprio was there, and I said ‘Hello’ to him, and I promptly departed him and went around the corner and just started weeping,” she said.
“And my husband, then-boyfriend, was with me and he was like, ‘I am so embarrassed right now.'”
Ferrara told Meyers that her husband Ryan Piers Williams, whom she married in 2011, urged her to “stop crying.”
“And I was like, ‘But it’s Leonardo!” she said.
“I hope Leonardo DiCaprio never sees this,” Ferrara added.
“The good thing is he probably won’t,” Meyers joked.
Meyers, 50, then told Ferrara that he did the “same thing” when he met Julia Roberts for the first time. The comedian explained that the encounter happened backstage while he was hosting the 66th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2014.
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“I walked by her. She was like, ‘Hey, good job.’ I was like, ‘Oh, thanks, so nice to meet you.’ Walked around — full cry,” he recalled. And my wife wasn’t with me, but I FaceTimed because I wanted her to see.”
During her appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” Ferrara shared that she was recently almost brought to tears after Tom Hanks complimented her on her performance in “Barbie.”
The “Superstore” alum said that she met Hanks, 67, at the Governors Awards on Jan. 9.
“Growing up, people were like, ‘Oh, who do you want to be? Like Salma Hayek, like J.Lo?’ I was like, ‘Tom Hanks,’ she remembered. “I wanted to be Tom Hanks. Like, that was my goal. And just a couple weeks ago, he came up to me and he said very nice things to me.”
“It was like I was in seven different timelines at the same time,” Ferrara said of her reaction to Hanks’ remarks. “I was like eight[years-old], I was ten, I was 14, I was 80 remembering this on my deathbed.”
“It was just so crazy,” she added. “I was like, ‘If you knew what was happening in my mind right now.’ But he was saying really nice things to me. And I was trying to remember every single thing he said. And at the same time, I was shaking and terrified that I was going to start crying in front of him.”
Ferrara was nominated for her first Oscar for her role as Gloria in last summer’s mega-hit “Barbie,” which earned a total of eight nominations. She will compete for the award against fellow nominees Jodie Foster, Emily Blunt, Danielle Brooks and Da’Vine Joy Randolph at the ceremony on March 10 at Los Angeles’ Dolby Theater.
