... along with 10 other tormentable celebrities who were slipped into games without their knowledge
Resident Evil's Leon and Claire are... Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes If you've ever looked at Resident Evil 4 and wondered why super-badass Leon S. Kennedy swaggers around with a stupid haircut and boyish looks, your answer lies way back in Resident Evil 2 - and in the 1996 film Romeo + Juliet. We don't know exactly what it was about the onscreen pairing of Claire Danes and '90s-haired Leonardo DiCaprio that caught the imagination of the Resident Evil 2 design team, but something about those two kids apparently screamed "unstoppable zombie killers" to the brains behind the game.
Whatever the reasons, the two heroes of RE2 ended up as dead ringers for DiCaprio and Danes, and their names - Leon and Claire - eradicated any doubt in the minds of those who noticed the resemblance. Maybe the designers just really liked the movie and wanted to put an homage to it into their game. Maybe they were struggling with a way to generate some chemistry between their two leads, and basing them off an established screen couple made it easier. Or maybe they really, really wanted to see the two pretty actors get torn apart and devoured by moaning, idiot corpses. However you choose to look at it, it's entertaining.
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After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.
