Leonardo DiCaprio Wore Butt Padding When He Was Spanked by Robert De Niro in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon was a fantastic film, it’s insanely long and you feel the length of it, but it was a masterfully made movie. I just want to say that Lilly Gladstone stole the film and gave an incredible performance! While Leonardo DiCaprio is getting a lot of praise, she definitely gives a better performance in the movie.

There is an amusing scene in the movie where we see DiCaprio leaning over a chair as Robert De Niro repeatedly spanks him with a wooden paddle. De Niro has to wack him hard as well! There’s power behind those spanks!

Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto recently talked about this scene in an interview with Insider and he revealed that DiCaprio wore butt padding for the scene. Butt, he also recalled thinking while watching De Niro hit him, “Oh, that must hurt.” Prieto talked about how DiCaprio was up for anything.

“I don’t think that was in the first script. That was something that was added, and it’s shocking in the film. I do remember doing them quite a few times and thinking, ‘Oh, that must hurt.’ There was some padding on his butt. But you could tell De Niro was really hitting him…Leo is game for so much. He’ll do anything.”

I’d like to think the scene was added after Scorsese and De Niro grew annoyed with DiCaprio Improvising some of his dialogue. It was recently reported that they would roll their eyes at him and that De Niro didn’t even want to talk when DiCaprio would do that. I think it’d be funny if they thought they’d teach him a lesson by spanking him on screen. I doubt that’s the case, but I just want to think that.

The spanking scene happens about halfway into the film after DiCaprio’s character, Ernest Burkhart, has messed up on something that his uncle told him to do. De Niro’s character, William Hale, decides to punish his nephew by bending him over and spanking him.

The scene definitely brought out the laughs in the theater!