Robert De Niro Spanks Leonardo DiCaprio In ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ – And Leo Had To Wear A Butt Pad

In Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon, the crime lord, William King Hale (Robert De Niro), spanks his nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), in a shocking scene.

“I don’t think that was in the first script,” Rodrigo Prieto said during a recent interview with Insider. “That was something that was added, and it’s shocking in the film.'”

This scene was also not in the original 2017 non-fiction book by David Grann on which the film was based, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.

The spanking scene occurs in the second act. During this part of the film, Hale is upset with Burkhart for ruining a part of their plan to kill the rich Osage family of his wife, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone).

Hale then leads his nephew into a back room. In response to his mistake, Hale has him bend over and spanks him with a large paddle.

Prieto clarified that he was very attentive about the amount of takes it took to finish this particular scene. “I do remember doing them quite a few times and thinking, ‘Oh, that must hurt,'” he stated.

“There was some padding on his butt. But you could tell De Niro was really hitting him,” Prieto noted.

“Leo is game for so much,” Prieto declared. “He’ll do anything.”

DiCaprio is known for improvising lines in his movies. His improvisations seemed to have annoyed both Scorsese and DeNiro.

Scorsese described the actor’s improvising as “‘endless, endless, endless'” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“Every now and then, Bob and I would look at each other and roll our eyes a little bit,” Scorsese continued. “‘And we’d tell him: ‘You don’t need that dialogue.'”

Last month, the film’s costume consultant, Julie O’Keefe, told uInterview exclusively: “[Scorsese] now has set a bar for other directors in Hollywood to really sit down when they tell these Native stories, not just ours but you know any nations.”