“There’s no way”: the scene Joe Pesci refused to film until a 9-year-old girl did it first
Despite earning a reputation for playing fearsome, tough guys cursed by a debilitating case of short man syndrome, Joe Pesci ended up succumbing to the most hilarious form of peer pressure imaginable.
This is an actor who had no problems turning the air blue with almost lyrical beauty, gunned down more than a few people onscreen, and snarled his way into the history books as one of his generation’s finest character actors, but he was almost upstaged by a nine-year-old girl.
It wasn’t even a co-star, either; merely a child who was brought onto the set to prove to Pesci that he was being a diva, before they were quickly ushered away, leaving him to think long and hard about whether or not refusing to shoot a scene that a kid had no issues performing was how he wanted to be remembered.
While we’re romanticising the idea somewhat, that doesn’t make it any less fun to think about Pesci crossing his arms, pouting his lips, and throwing his toys out of the pram, digging his heels in and declaring that there’s no chance in hell he’ll shoot the sequence, until a voice bellows out from the darkness: “BRING OUT THE NINE-YEAR-OLD GIRL.”
Fresh from his Academy Award-winning tour de force as Tommy DeVito in Martin Scorsese’s seminal Goodfellas, Pesci carried every ounce of that baggage with him into Home Alone, with Harry Lyme essentially a combination of his signature role and Lethal Weapon‘s Leo Getz.
When it came to having the top of his head set on fire with a blowtorch when he and Daniel Stern’s Merv are trying to break into the home of Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister, though, he drew the line, until director Chris Columbus pulled his trump card to shame the veteran actor into going through with it.
“The blowtorch is actually real,” the director recalled. “And Joe Pesci had to wear a cap, and when we offered it to Joe, he said, ‘There’s no way I’m wearing that fucking thing’. Mark Radcliffe, who was our producer, brought out his nine-year-old daughter, put the cap on her, and we put the torch on her to actually show Joe Pesci, ‘You’re gonna be OK, Joe.'”
Adding insult to injury, Culkin then got in on the act, asking Pesci the most pertinent of questions: “You gonna let the nine-year-old girl show you up?” It did the trick, with the diminutive legend deciding then and there that, no, he was not going to let the nine-year-old girl show him up.
Modern-day safety laws might have a thing or two to say about a nine-year-old putting on a flame-retardant hat and having their head set on fire to prove a point to a movie star, but you can’t say it didn’t do the trick.
