Ayo Edebiri’s almost involvement in a Martin Scorsese movie: “My villain origin story”
Over the last few years, Ayo Edebiri has proven that there isn’t much she can’t do, with an effortless charisma and magnetic screen presence that has led to roles in everything from The Bear, Bottoms, Inside Out 2 and the upcoming drama from Luca Guadagnino, After The Hunt.
Hailing from Boston, Edebiri has taken Hollywood by storm through her infectious sense of humour and endless stories about her plights while working her way up in the industry, describing one near brush with greatness that will haunt her forever.
Despite being a proud New Yorker, Martin Scorsese has directed pictures that take him to many other parts of the United States, with a surprising upcoming project with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in Hawaii and other stories filmed in places like Florida, Oklahoma and Boston.
For anyone who lives in Boston, the city now has a fearless reputation after Scorsese’s 2006 film The Departed was filmed there, following a cat and mouse chase between an undercover cop and a mole in his unit, both seeking to uncover the other and leading to deadly consequences.
Starring Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, it’s one of Scorsese’s greatest gangster epics and a story that continues to entertain, something that can largely be attributed to the repeated pronunciation of the word microprocessor and the looming prevalence of the Bostonian accent.
While Edebiri was just a child when the film was filmed, she has a painful memory of when her family was asked to be involved in the production and her father declined, describing the experience as her “villain origin story”.
She explained, “So when I was a child, they were filming The Departed in Boston, and you know, they’re all around town. I’m like 10 years old. And they were filming it and there was a knock on our door one day and me and my dad were heading out to piano lessons, and it was somebody [from the production] and they were like ‘Hey, we’re about to film this Martin Scorsese movie. How would you feel about letting us use your house?’”
This could be viewed as a huge opportunity by many people, but this was not the case for Edebiri’s dad, who was very alarmed by the prospect and immediately looked for answers. She continued, “And my Dad was like ‘Use my house? So you can get the deed to my house? You see a working immigrant man with a house and you want to steal the house? You want to come inside the house, take my keys, take the deed and take my family? Nice try’. And they’re like, no, that’s not how that works. We just want to use your house for a few days and we’ll pay you for it… if you wait 30 minutes, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio will come’. And he left, and I went to piano lessons”.
It’s incredibly funny to imagine her father being so suspicious of Scorsese and his team, perhaps not knowing the scale of the film or the extent of his daughter’s love for DiCaprio. However, Edebiri has now risen to equally impressive heights in the industry, showing that if you wait around long enough, then Scorsese will eventually notice you.
