“I won’t let that happen”: the 1990 co-star Robin Williams was terrified would “blow him off the screen”
Being in a movie with Robin Williams must have been a blessing and a curse.
On one hand, you get to share the bill with one of the most accomplished actors of his generation, guaranteed to make you laugh in between takes, and on the other, you must have known you were going to get upstaged, but one actor Williams was afraid of was Robert De Niro.
The two got a chance to work together in the 1990 drama Awakenings, with Williams playing the role of the fictional doctor Malcolm Sawyer, based on real-life neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose memoirs inspired the film, and De Niro playing one of his patients.
Sawyer discovers a drug that can revive people from decades-long comas, caused by encephalitis, and one of them is Leonard Lowe (De Niro), who, after having caught the disease as a child, slipped into a vegetative state, and now waking up, finds himself a fully-grown man.
De Niro was offered the chance to play Sawyer, but opted for Lowe instead. Perhaps influenced by the fact that he looks so much like Sacks (seriously, look it up), director Penny Marshall contacted Williams, who knew the star from his days on Mork & Mindy, which was created by her brother Garry. According to Dave Itzkoff’s book Robin, she knew she was taking a big risk when she appointed the funnyman.
“He’s not thought of as a dramatic actor, but I like to juggle things around,” Marshall said (via Stephen Blackford on Medium), “I see things that aren’t always apparent”.
The director might have had confidence in Williams to go toe-to-toe with De Niro, but he wasn’t so convinced. “[Robin] was afraid Bobby was going to blow him off the screen,” Marshall continued, “I said, ‘I won’t let that happen’”.
Of course, Williams was absolutely right to be worried. If you showed even a hint of weakness, Robert freakin’ De Niro would chew you up and spit you out, but Williams was more than up to the challenge. He played perfectly against his co-star (and close friend), and his performance drew rave reviews. He was nominated for a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama’, but missed out on an Oscar nod. Don’t worry, his time would come.
Between Awakenings and Dead Poets Society, which came out the year before, Williams had established himself as a highly capable dramatic actor. This sparked a new phase of his career, where he balanced his usual comedic fare with more serious roles, which came to a head in 1998, when he won ‘Best Supporting Actor’ at the Oscars for his role in Good Will Hunting.
As much as Williams himself deserves credit for his amazing work in Awakenings, Penny Marshall should be celebrated for taking a chance on him. There was every possibility of this going horribly wrong, but she clearly knew what she was doing, although her heart must have dropped when Williams accidentally broke De Niro’s nose on set one day.
