Robert De Niro is known for his unmatched commitment on screen, but when it comes to sketch comedy, the two-time Oscar winner knows exactly when to draw the line. While he was game for whatever absurd premise the late-night writers pitched, one particular stunt pushed his tolerance for costume changes to the absolute limit.
Robert De Niro Reveals He Shut Down an SNL Director on Set
Reflecting on De Niro’s hosting stints during an appearance on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, former Saturday Night Live head writer Seth Meyers detailed what happened behind the scenes of his recurring Nickelodeon parody sketch, Pranksters. In the bit, kids show off harmless everyday pranks alongside older men whose version of a joke turns wildly violent.
For De Niro’s installment, the setup went to a chaotic extreme.
“A kid would come on first and his prank would be like, ‘I put a rubber spider in my teacher’s drawer,'” Meyers remembered. “And then De Niro would come out and his neighbor borrowed his lawn mower, so he hid in his garage and then cut him up with a chainsaw.”
Pulling off the gag required longtime SNL commercial parody director Jim Signorelli to douse De Niro in an overwhelming blast of sticky stage gore. The moment the scene cut, the crew prepared to wipe the slate clean and go again.
“We filmed the first take and Robert De Niro got covered in, you know, whatever pudding-type substance was supposed to be blood,” Meyers said. “And I remember Jim was like, ‘All right, let’s clean him up and take it from the top’.”
De Niro, however, had zero intention of scrubbing down just to do it all over again.
“De Niro just looked at me and said, ‘Do we get it? We get it,'” Meyers recalled with a laugh. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, we got it.’ He goes, ‘Okay, goodbye.’ Just like, again, it was a perfect take. But I had this moment of like, I don’t want to have written a thing that makes Robert De Niro take a full shower to shoot a second take.”
The sketch aired as shot, the joke landed, and the Hollywood veteran walked off Studio 8H having made his point without needing a single rinse.
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