Why ‘The Sopranos’ star Steve Schirripa hated Robert De Niro with a passion: “He couldn’t be ruder”
As a sprawling saga revolving around an Italian-American crime family, it was inevitable that there’d be some cross-pollination between The Sopranos and Robert De Niro, who’s starred in several of the greatest gangster films ever made.
While De Niro didn’t appear in the show, he worked with a lot of people who did. Over two dozen actors who’d been cast in Martin Scorsese’s seminal Goodfellas also swung by northern New Jersey to get caught up in the world that surrounded James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, but it’s a performer who failed an audition for another one of the duo’s crime classics that ended up hating the two-time Academy Award winner’s guts.
Steve Schirripa, an integral part of The Sopranos as Tony’s brother-in-law, Bobby Baccalieri, made his feature debut in the Scorsese-helmed and De Niro-led Casino as a man at a bar. He’d originally auditioned for a much bigger part, but he did get to spend 16 hours on the set and walked away from the production with his Screen Actors Guild card, so it wasn’t a total bust.
However, meeting one of the greatest actors in cinema history certainly was. “De Niro was an asshole to me,” Schirripa recalled during an appearance on We Might Be Drunk. “I did not like De Niro before, and I don’t like Robert De Niro now. You say hello to him, and he’s stuck for a fucking answer.”
Channelling the spirit of ‘Bobby Bacala’, he continued to let rip: “This guy is a zero. If he don’t have a script in his hand, he can’t speak.” It sounds as though Schirripa was doing the nice thing of introducing himself to De Niro on the Casino set, only to be completely ignored, and he clearly hasn’t forgotten it.
His name came up again on the Talking Sopranos podcast, and when pressed for his thoughts on Scorsese’s first on-camera muse, Schirripa wasn’t in the mood for sugarcoating it. Describing De Niro as “an asshole,” his overriding thoughts on the notoriously publicity-shy and less-than-eloquent legend was that “he couldn’t be ruder.”
Most people who’ve followed De Niro’s career are well aware that he doesn’t like talking at length in a public setting, especially about himself. Did Schirripa know? Either way, it does seem a little rude that he’d be brushed off without so much as a word when all the future Sopranos favourite wanted to do was introduce himself.
It’s been a bone of contention since the mid-1990s, and maybe it’s just as well De Niro wasn’t one of the many Goodfellas alumni who also guested in the seminal series, otherwise Schirripa may well have given him a piece of his mind for shunning him on Casino, which didn’t give him the best introduction to Hollywood, even if it did at least create a lasting memory, albeit of the worst kind.
