Why Robert De Niro banned Joe Pesci from working with Burt Reynolds: “I was really hurt by that”
Even though he was one of Hollywood’s biggest and most bankable names between the late 1970s and early 1980s, Burt Reynolds wasn’t the kind of actor that everyone was falling over themselves to work with.
Part of that was because he was something of an anomaly in ‘New Hollywood’; the era was defined by a new generation of everymen who eschewed typical movie-star looks in favour of using their performative prowess to rise above the pack and become the most in-demand leading men of their generation.
That’s not to say they were horrible to look at, but it’s also true that the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Richard Dreyfuss, and the rest weren’t anybody’s idea of what a conventional A-lister should look like before then, with the ‘Golden Age’ largely prioritising good looks over dramatic heft.
Meanwhile, Reynolds was much more of a star than an actor. Nobody expected him to be troubling the Academy Awards, and he seemed comfortable in his wheelhouse as the rugged and manly focal point of countless action thrillers, odd-couple capers, and frothy buddy adventures, with audiences embracing him as the number one draw in the United States for half a decade.
He worked with some great actors, but he missed out on the chance to collaborate with Joe Pesci when Robert De Niro put his foot down and insisted it wasn’t happening. If there were two diametrically opposed forces in the business in the early 1980s, it was the method man who led Raging Bull and the moustachioed lothario who took top billing in The Cannonball Run.
Reynolds was hoping to capitalise on Pesci’s Academy Award-nominated breakout role in Martin Scorsese’s aforementioned boxing drama, and he thought he’d gotten his man until De Niro intervened and made it perfectly clear that his co-star wouldn’t be caught dead in Sharky’s Machine.
“What’s interesting is Joe Pesci was up for the role of Nosh in my picture,” Reynolds shared. “We had five meetings. His agent is Bob De Niro. He doesn’t have an agent, and Bob De Niro told him not to do it, and De Niro didn’t want him to do the movie with me. De Niro felt it would hurt his career to do a picture with me, and I was really hurt by that, personally. And I also thought De Niro was crazy.”
With his Raging Bull sibling whispering in his ear, Pesci decided that he didn’t want to be a part of Sharky’s Machine after all, even after five meetings with its star and director, and you have to assume those meetings were productive, since they had another four after the first one. Reynolds thought he had his man, only to have his legs cut out from under him by one of the best in the business.
It even caused an awkward moment between them years later when Reynolds needled De Niro and asked him to stop giving Pesci advice, but it was too late. In the end, Richard Libertini played Nosh in the movie, and taking tenth billing in a thriller probably wasn’t the best use of the diminutive actor’s talents when he was fresh off Raging Bull, even if Pesci’s eventual follow-up, I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can, was demonstrably worse than Sharky’s Machine by every conceivable metric.
