Robert De Niro has been professionally acting for over 60 years, but it was in the mid-1970s that he started becoming the household name we know him as today. After impressing in 1973’s Mean Streets and 1974’s The Godfather Part II, the latter of which netted him an Academy Award, 1976 brought Taxi Driver, where he played the Oscar-nominated role of Travis Bickle. De Niro starred opposite an adolescent Jodie Foster in his second collaboration with director Martin Scorsese, but I just learned that the she thought the elder actor was “really uninteresting” when they were working together.
Foster herself revealed this while speaking at the Marrakech Film Festival (via Variety) after receiving a tribute award. After sharing how Robert De Niro “took me under his wing” during Taxi Driver and ran lines with her at coffee shops. However, because he was taking a Method approach with playing Travis, the mentally unhinged Vietnam War veteran (or is he?)-turned-cab driver, Foster actually found him to be boring during this time, saying:
