In an interview with Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, Robert De Niro spoke about his recently injured leg. “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 said the injury wouldn’t affect his performance as bad-guy cattleman William Hale in Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon, which is currently rolling. “[Hale is] pretty much a sedentary character in a way,” he said. “I don’t move around a lot, thank God. So we’ll manage. I just have to get the procedure done and keep it straight in a certain position and let it heal.”
And so the point of this riff: Please name the most vividly etched sedentary characters in the history of cinema, starting with Jabba the Hutt and moving on down. How about Orson Welles‘ Cardinal Woolsey in A Man For All Seasons (’66)? Or the supreme Martian commander in Invaders From Mars (green head, face of a Mexican woman, communicates with lizard-like pincers or tentacles)? Maybe the iron-lung guy in The Big Lebowski? Or William Hickey‘s Don Corrado in Prizzi’s Honor.
Only full sedentary characters qualify. Sidney Greenstreet sits like an iron Buddha statue 95% of the time in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, but now and then he gets up and walks into or out of a room — that’s a disqualifier.
