The acting role Robert De Niro convinced Martin Scorsese to play: “Everyone was against it”
Peanut butter and jam, fish and chips, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. The director and his favourite actor fit together like a dream, having collaborated on some of the greatest movies ever made. Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, Cape Fear, and perhaps their greatest joint contribution to cinema, 1976’s Taxi Driver.
Under Scorsese’s watchful eye, De Niro transformed himself into Travis Bickle, a pissed-off Vietnam veteran whose mind slowly falls apart as he drives around the dangerous streets of New York. Though not their first picture together (that would be Mean Streets from three years earlier), this was the one that solidified the two Big Apple boys as one of the most impactful and productive combos in filmmaking history.
It turns out that De Niro isn’t just responsible for bringing Bickle to life but also for getting Scorsese’s face in his own film. The director makes a small appearance as a passenger in Bickle’s taxi, which he uses to stalk his own wife. The role was initially set to be played by George Memmoli, but when he got injured filming a movie called The Farmer, a new actor was needed and fast.
“De Niro told me I should do it,” Scorsese told The Hollywood Reporter. “Everyone was against it. But I was thinking that it was a labor of love, a film that was made for us and not a popular film in the sense that we could take chances and see what happened. If worse comes to worst, we could reshoot with another actor.”
De Niro recalls it differently, though, saying, “There was no one else to do it, as I remember it, and I was happy with Marty doing it.” As it turns out, he was right to be confident.
Scorsese’s parents, Charles and Catherine, had both been actors. He’d attend art school and surrounded himself with performers (this is where he first met Harvey Keitel, for example), so acting was very much something he was used to. He’d even given himself small parts in some of his previous movies. He plays the role of the passenger, who gets angry at Bickle after an argument over the meter, with great intensity, scaring the bejeezus out of anyone watching. As non-actors go, he’s pretty damned good, and the cameo has gone down as one of the most memorable by a director in their own work.
“I was afraid that Marty would see himself and would be so mortified and cut himself out of the movie,” said Paul Schrader, future directing legend and Taxi Driver’s scriptwriter. “I liked the scene. I said to Michael and Julia [Phillips], ‘Marty is going to cast himself in this role and he’s going to see it and he’s not going to like it and then he’s going to cut the scene out!’ I was 100 percent wrong. He saw it, he loved it, and he kept every single bit of himself in.” This brush with stardom clearly gave Scorsese the bug, as he’s appeared in dozens of other films since then, including voicing a puffer fish in the animated film Shark Tale and another brief appearance at the end of Killers of the Flower Moon.
In the true spirit of modesty, Scorsese praised De Niro for helping him out. “I did one take, and he [De Niro] said to me, ‘When you say ‘Turn off the meter,’ make me turn it off. Just make me turn it off. I’m not going to turn it off until you convince me that you want me to turn off that meter.’ So, I learned a lot,” he revealed. “He sort of acted with the back of his head, but he encouraged me by not responding to me. And using that tension of the inherent violence, I was able to able to [sic] take off and riff some dialogue.”
