The legendary 1970s movie Robert De Niro called “the best job I never got”
Like almost every other acting heavyweight, Robert De Niro has turned down several roles that became huge in another star’s hands, and he didn’t seem too bothered by missing out.
He might have been behind closed doors, but publicly, he had no regrets. However, when he was in the running for a part that he was actively chasing and he didn’t get it, instead of ruing the one that got away, he came to realise that being rejected was one of the best things that ever happened to him.
Anthony Hopkins won an Academy Award for playing Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, and at one stage, the cannibalistic serial killer was De Niro’s for the taking. He backed out, and despite Jonathan Demme’s thriller claiming the ‘Big Five’ at the Oscars, he didn’t lament the missed opportunity.
Tom Hanks got the first Academy Award nomination of his career for Big, which catapulted him onto the A-list. De Niro was ahead of him on the wish-list on that occasion, and he knocked it back, too. That was for the best, since you can’t really see him in the part, and it might have even had the knock-on effect of luring him into comedies a decade earlier, and it’s horrifying to think of a world where he made more of them.
He could have been in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and The Departed, as well as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, but he waved them all away. When the latter was auditioning potential cast members for The Godfather in the early 1970s, De Niro was in the running for two of them, but ended up with nothing. On the plus side, it became the making of him.
The up-and-comer read for Sonny Corleone and Paulie Gatto when The Godfather was putting its pieces together, and he was even offered the bouffant-sporting bodyguard and driver of Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone, which he turned down in favour of making The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
Coppola’s masterpiece may have become the highest-grossing release in cinema history, latched onto the cultural consciousness and refused to let go, and won the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’, but for obvious reasons, De Niro called it “the best job I ever, never got,” and the reason why needs no explanation: “It meant I was available for The Godfather Part II.”
When the time came for the sequel, someone who could match Brando as the young Vito was required, and as far as Coppola was concerned, there was only one man for the job, and that man wouldn’t have been able to do that job had he already worked on the original, with the follow-up every bit as good as its predecessor.
It also allowed De Niro to make history, with the actor following in his idol’s footsteps and making the patriarch of the crime family the first character to be portrayed in two separate Oscar-winning performances, with the soon-to-be legend of the silver screen claiming the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ prize on his very first nomination.
