The director Robert De Niro will always thank for turning him down: “Thank you for not casting me”
If you’ve ever had the dubious (and no doubt brief) pleasure of watching a Robert De Niro interview, you’ll know that the man is not particularly talkative. Trying to get him to expound on his career is like trying to draw blood from a stone — you will end up frustrated and possibly hurt while he will continue to look impassive and even, perhaps, inanimate. From the beginning, he’s let his work do the talking, and it’s hard to fault him for it (Dirty Grandpa aside).
Of all the actors who can get away with this kind of aversion to fame, it’s De Niro, who is regularly cited as the greatest actor of his generation and a pivotal figure in the New Hollywood and post-New Hollywood movements. Martin Scorsese might deserve most of the credit for the groundbreaking filmmaking of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas, but they are impossible to imagine without the contributions of De Niro and his masterful acting.
Despite his reticence to speak whenever a microphone is foisted in front of him, the star has occasionally let slip some bits of insight, whether he intends to or not. He even told a surprisingly lengthy story once about having tea with the Taliban during the production of The Good Shepherd. Recently, during the American Film Institute’s tribute to Francis Ford Coppola, he even offered a glimpse into his own emotions, thanking the director profusely for rejecting him for a part way back in the ‘70s.
De Niro was just starting to get a foothold in the film industry when the opportunity to audition for The Godfather arose. He hadn’t yet worked with Scorsese, but he had appeared in a handful of Brian De Palma’s early movies. All he needed was a film that could showcase his talents.
Coppola was still hunting for an actor to play the role of Sonny Corleone, the most volatile of mafia family headed by Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone. De Niro auditioned for the role but lost it to James Caan in what would seem to be one of the most frustrating rejections of an actor’s career.
However, as De Niro himself attested, it changed his life for the better. “Francis, thank you for not casting me in The Godfather,” he said. “It was the best job I never got. And it meant I was available for The Godfather Part II.” Indeed, if De Niro had played the relatively minor role of Sonny in the first film, he would have instantly taken himself out of contention for playing the younger version of Vito Corleone in the sequel.
After the success of the first movie, Coppola got to work on the second, this one split between the ascent of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) to his father’s position in the family and Vito Corleone’s early career decades before. By that point, De Niro’s career was on its way to lifting off. He had done his first collaboration with Scorsese in Mean Streets and was poised to become Hollywood’s most exciting young star. Landing the role of young Vito Corleone changed his career and earned him his first Oscar.
