Robert De Niro says leg injury while filming ‘manageable’

Hollywood actor Robert De Niro may have suffered a leg injury during the making of Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” but for one, it was thankfully not on set, and for another, the Academy Award winner took it like a good sport.

In an interview, De Niro said “I tore my quad somehow,” he said. “It’s just a simple stepping over something and I just went down. The pain was excruciating and now I have to get it fixed. But it happens, especially when you get older, you have to be prepared for unexpected things. But it’s manageable.”

De Niro’s injury happened in Oklahoma, leading him to fly back to New York City on May 13, where he sought medical attention. The two-time Oscar-winning actor was in Oklahoma filming Martin Scorsese’s massive Apple-backed Western “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Deadline reported De Niro was already scheduled to fly to New York on May 13 anyway, as he was “planning to take a few weeks off the production.” For this reason, production on “Flower Moon” is not going to be delayed.

De Niro said the injury isn’t likely to affect his performance as cattleman William Hale. “What I’m doing with Scorsese in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ I’m pretty much a sedentary character in a way. I don’t move around a lot, thank God. So we’ll manage,” he said. “I just have to get the procedure done and keep it straight in a certain position and let it heal.”
De Niro stressed that “Flower Moon,” which AppleTV+ is producing, will not be exclusively a streaming release. “One of the things is that it has to play in theatres,” he said. That’s a very strong component of it. By the time it comes out, hopefully it’ll be back to a close-to-normal situation.”

Scorsese kicked off production on “Killers of the Flower Moon” last month. The movie is currently filming in Bartlesville, Pawhuska, and Osage County, Oklahoma. Along with De Niro, the ensemble cast also includes Leonardo DiCaprio as Hale’s nephew Ernest Burkhart, Lily Gladstone as Ernest’s wife Mollie Burkhart, and Jesse Plemons as Tom White, an FBI agent tasked with investigating a string of murders among the Osage Nation. The movie, with a script by “Forrest Gump” Oscar winner Eric Roth, is based on David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same name.