The one role Robert De Niro played against his will: “I never thought of playing the part”
As would be expected of a generation talent who spent decades as one of the industry’s most in-demand actors, Robert De Niro turned down his fair share of roles that would go on to become iconic.
He declined the chance to play Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, knocked back his close friend and regular collaborator when he was approached for the title role in The Last Temptation of Christ and Martin Sheen’s gig in The Departed, rejected Tom Hanks’ breakthrough part in Big, Joe Pesci’s Home Alone villain, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
Those are only the films that seized the zeitgeist, soared at the box office, or won Academy Awards, which is just the tip of the iceberg for De Niro’s ‘what if’ scenarios. He’d always been selective about which films he signed up for, even if the sheer volume of shitty flicks he’s appeared in since the turn of the millennium have indicated that’s no longer his most pressing concern.
However, there was one part he ended up playing against his will, but at least it was a passion project. Having initially been scripted for his Godfather Part II director Coppola before passing onto his Ronin boss John Frankenheimer, Eric Roth’s screenplay for The Good Shepherd eventually ended up in De Niro’s lap.
At first, the Oscar-winning icon had no intention of appearing on camera. He’d done so in his feature-length directorial debut, A Bronx Tale, but it wasn’t an experience he was eager to replicate. As a period-set spy flick with several sequences shot in black-and-white that carried a hefty $80million budget, though, it was gently suggested that it would be a lot easier to make if De Niro were onscreen too.
“I never thought of playing the part,” he admitted to CNN of embodying military general Bill Sullivan. “I was discussing who we could get, and one of the studio executives said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ I said, ‘OK, maybe I could do it, and whatever I get for that I’ll put back into the movie’. That’s why I did the part.
Most of the star-studded principal cast took significant pay cuts, including Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, and his old Goodfellas cohort Pesci. De Niro didn’t even want to be in his own movie, but a combination of his name recognition and the ability to defer his acting salary and funnel it back into the production budget was made with A Good Shepherd‘s best interests at heart.
The downside is that the film fell flat despite De Niro being drafted into the ensemble against his will. It wasn’t a catastrophic bomb but hardly set the critical or commercial spheres on fire. He was even looking ahead to potential sequels, but it didn’t make anywhere near enough money to justify another substantial investment on the studio’s part.
