Robert De Niro Didn't Hold Back For That Spanking In Killers Of The Flower Moon
The article contains spoilers for "Killers of the Flower Moon."
Plenty of people have thought about spanking Leonardo DiCaprio. That's just a fact. And we're not here to kink shame. But only one person was able to make that a reality, at least on the big screen, and that's Robert De Niro.
In Martin Scorsese's stirring drama "Killers of the Flower Moon," the legendary "Taxi Driver" star plays the sinister and scheming King Willam Hale, who has been unfolding a plot to take land and money from the people of the Osage nation by marrying wealthy members of the community and methodically killing them off. As part of this plan, he recruits his nephew Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) to marry Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman of means. But beyond that, Hale also gets Burkhart involved in other parts of his plan. One such task finds Hale ordering Ernest to murder Henry Roan, Mollie's first husband, in order to collect on his life insurance.
However, Ernest messes up the assassination by hiring someone who doesn't follow through properly and fails to paint the death as a suicide. As punishment, Hale paddles him inside a Masonic temple for flubbing the killing. It turns out that spanking was rather real. And even though DiCaprio was wearing protection to absorb the blow, De Niro didn't hold back when smacking him with that paddle.
Bad boy!
Speaking to Business Insider, "Killers of the Flower Moon" cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto revealed that the spanking scene wasn't always part of the movie. "I don't think that was in the first script. That was something that was added, and it's shocking in the film," he noted.
Indeed, the punishment for DiCaprio's character is both surprising and a little bit funny, but still unsettling. It allows Hale to show his power over Ernest in the most primitive of ways. It's not as threatening as pointing a gun at his face, but the humiliation may even be more effective. After all, Ernest knows that Hale isn't going to kill him because he's an integral part of rounding up as much Osage wealth as he can. So the only way to get through to him is with an old-fashioned spanking.
When it came to actually filming the scene, DiCaprio had protection in the form of padding on his butt, but Prieto said that it still appeared to be rather intense:
"I do remember doing them quite a few times and thinking, 'Oh, that must hurt.' There was some padding on his butt. But you could tell De Niro was really hitting him. Leo is game for so much. He'll do anything."
There's a chance that De Niro might have been working out some frustrations that he and Scorsese had with DiCaprio's tendency to improvise dialogue during production.
A Wall Street Journal Magazine profile found Scorsese remembering the irritation that DiCaprio would occasionally cause on set by improvising lines. Scorsese recalled, "Every now and then, Bob and I would look at each other and roll our eyes a little bit. And we'd tell [DiCaprio], 'You don't need that dialogue.'"
Perhaps the amount of improv DiCaprio attempted was enough to warrant a real spanking? Naughty, naughty!