When watching all of Robert De Niro’s movies, it’s impossible not to pick up a deal of trivia about the great man. We’re not talking here about the common-or-garden stuff about Taxi Driver inspiring would-be Ronald Reagan assassin John Hinckley. Or that De Niro and Marlon Brando are the only actors to win Oscars for playing the same character (Vito Corleone). Or even the 296 uses of the F-bomb in Goodfellas. No, this is advanced-level trivia as befits a man prone to perfection. This, as De Niro explained to John Cazale (who only appeared in five films, but all were Oscar nominated) in The Deer Hunter with equal parts eloquence and enigma after the latter’s character had forgotten his boots, is this.
You don’t know Jack (or John)
At Henry Hill’s wedding in Goodfellas every male appears to be called either Peter or Paul. There’s a similar pattern with the J-word when it comes to De Niro’s roles.
Jackie Burke (The Comedian)
Jack Byrnes (Meet The Parents/Meet The Fockers/Little Fockers)
Jack Mabry (Stone)
Jack Walsh (Midnight Run)
Jake LaMotta (Raging Bull)
Jonathan Flynn (Being Flynn)
Johnny Boy (Mean Streets)
Jon Rubin (Hi Mom!/Greetings)
Jimmy “The Gent” Conway (Goodfellas)
Jimmy Doyle (New York, New York)
Joe Sarcone (Crossfire)
One-offs: Rupert, Travis, The Creature
Unquantifiable oddities
In Mistress (1992) De Niro’s character, Evan M Wright, threatens his mistress, Beverley (Sheryl Lee Ralph), “Don’t ever leave the phone off the hook like that again.”
Undaunted, she replies, “Don’t play Donald Trump with me. You know you’ll be sorry later.”
The future US president was clearly already a byword for misogynistic bluster in 1992. De Niro famously went on to publicly declare how much he would love to beat him up.
Sam Rockwell’s character, Billy, in Seven Psychopaths believes he is the illegitimate son of Travis Bickle.
In Analyse This, psychiatrist Billy Crystal dreams that he is Vito Corleone in the assassination scene from The Godfather and De Niro (his gangster client) drops his gun and fails to save him. When De Niro is told this, he replies, “I was Fredo? I don’t think so.”
Self-referential: ugly
In The Family, De Niro is a mobster hiding in the witness protection programme in France where he attends a screening of Goodfellas with his supervisor, Tommy Lee Jones. After the screening he discusses it in a Q&A with an enraptured audience. Like the rest of this wretched film, the scene makes absolutely no sense.
One scene you’ll always wish you hadn’t seen…
Jason Kelly (Zac Efron) stumbles in on his grandfather (De Niro) pleasuring himself to some onscreen pornography. Grandfather, of course, has to be called Dick. This is, after all, Dirty Grandpa. De Niro, in the same film, rapping along at a karaoke to Ice Cube’s “It Was A Good Day”, runs this scene a fairly close second.