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Killers of the Flower Moon star Robert De Niro was incensed Monday night when he discovered that his planned speech's political content was edited out, so he read them from his phone exclaiming, "How dare they do that!"
Robert De Niro will not be silenced. The veteran actor became notably flummoxed during Monday night's Gotham Awards in New York while presenting his speech to introduce the Historical Icon and Creator Tribute award for Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon.
De Niro, who also stars in the Apple TV+ film alongside Leonardo Di Caprio and Lily Gladstone, visibly stammered as he looked perplexed at the teleprompter and even asked its controller to scroll back, as if he were looking for something.
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View StoryA professional, De Niro carried on with what was written while talking about his friend and frequent collaborator, Scorsese, but it was clear that something was bothering him with the words.
"I just want to say one thing: The beginning of my speech was edited, cut out -- I didn’t know about it. And I want to read it," De Niro said after the show played a montage clip from the film and cut back to him.
And so, he pulled out his phone and proceeded to read his prepared remarks from that to an enthusiastic audience response.
The missing segment was political in nature and bashed former president Donald Trump, which is totally consistent with De Niro speeches over the past several, several years.
Following is the entire portion of De Niro's speech he said was edited out, but read from his phone. TooFab has reached out to the Gotham Awards for comment.
History isn't history anymore. Truth is not truth. Even facts are being replaced by alternative facts, and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness. In Florida, young students are taught that slaves developed skills that could be applied for their personal benefit.
The entertainment industry isn't immune to this festering disease. 'The Duke' John Wayne famously said of Native Americans, 'I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.'
Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan's arsenal. The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office, and he's keeping up the pace in his current campaign of retribution. But with all his lies, he can't hide his soul. He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature and shows disrespect, for example, by using 'Pocahontas' as a slur.
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View Story"Filmmakers, on the other hand, strive-- and this is where I came in and I saw that they edited all that," De Niro said. While suggesting that this was the part where he'd have thanked the Gotham Awards, he instead said, "I don’t feel like thanking them at all for what they did. How dare they do that, actually."
After expressing his frustration, he again professionally moved on to the acceptance portion of his duties, inviting the cast and filmmakers
His initial read of the speech went, "Watching the news these days makes one think, from a political point of view anyway, that we actually are living in a post-truth society. Filmmakers, on the other hand, at least aim for the truth." Between that first sentence and the second is where all of the above section was purportedly removed, per De Niro.
