Billy Crudup and Claire Danes shared a friendly interaction more than 20 years after their romance made headlines.
The exes were both in attendance at the NYU Tisch Gala 2025 at Cipriani South Street in New York City on Monday, April 7. In an Instagram clip from inside the event shared by People, Danes, 45, got up from her chair after Crudup, 56, stopped by her table to say hello.
The pair shared a sweet hug and a brief chat before Crudup headed back to his seat. At one point during their conversation, Crudup leaned in toward Danes to catch something she said. Earlier in the night, Danes walked the event’s purple carpet in a satin green gown and black cropped blazer. Crudup, for his part, sported a simple and chic navy tux with a white dress shirt.
Danes and Crudup seemingly attended Monday’s gala without their respective partners — Hugh Dancy and Naomi Watts — as they posed for pics solo and with fellow attendees.
The exes’ reunion comes over 20 years after the two met in 2003 on the set of the film Stage Beauty. The pair pursued a romance, despite Crudup’s relationship with Mary-Louise Parker at the time. Crudup called off his and Parker’s relationship that same year while she was seven months pregnant with their son, William, now 21.
In a 2004 profile with The New York Times, Crudup asked interviewer Jesse Green via email to not include “anything about the Mary-Louise Parker situation,” noting that the drama was “personal, painful and involves an infant.”
Parker, 60, recalled breaking down in a taxi after the split in her 2015 memoir, Dear Mr. You. After yelling at the driver for getting lost, the driver told her to get out of the car, saying, “I don’t want you anymore.” In response, she stated, “No one does. … My life is worse than yours in this moment. … I am alone. Look, see? I am pregnant and alone. It hurts to even breathe.”
Parker called Crudup and Danes’ romance scandal a “very low moment” during a November 2015 interview on Today. “Had I been in touch with a higher self and been forgiving of him, it would’ve been heroic,” she said of the taxi incident. “But I was so attached to my own unhappiness that I was unable to sort of rise above feeling persecuted, and it just created this dynamic with this perfect stranger. … He held up a mirror at my face. I’m not the hero of that story by any means. And he sort of haunted me because I didn’t consider him or his life.”
That same year, Danes called public judgment about her and Crudup’s relationship a “scary thing” during an October 2015 interview with Howard Stern. “That was really hard. I didn’t know how to not do that.”
Danes said she was “just in love with him” during her relationship with Crudup, , adding, “And [I] needed to explore that and I was 24 … I didn’t quite know what those consequences would be.”
Though she and Crudup ultimately called it quits in 2007, Danes told Stern, 71, that she and her former costar “were friends.”
Danes went on to wed Dancy, 49, in 2009, and the couple have welcomed three kids together. Crudup, meanwhile, tied the knot with Watts, 56, in 2023.
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