Seth Meyers Took World's Longest Elevator Ride With Robert De Niro

If you’re heading up a skyscraper to the 17th floor on a very slow elevator, can you imagine a more intimidating person with whom to share the ride than stone-faced Robert De Niro? Neither could Seth Meyers. He told his guest Graham Norton about just that kind of long, uncomfortable experience on yesterday’s edition of Late Night. 

“I remember the first time (De Niro) hosted SNL, and I had a wonderful time with him. It was, I think, my first year on the show, and I got in an elevator — sort of ran to catch an elevator — not realizing he was the only other person in the elevator,” Meyers remembered.  

Pretty cool for a young comic to share a lift with a two-time Oscar winner, right? Not exactly. “That was not as exciting as that seemed,” Meyers confessed, “because he’s so comfortable being quiet.”

The ride was painfully slow, Meyers explained. What happens if you try to make small talk with Robert De Niro? Does he go all Goodfellas on you? Does he give you the Meet the Parents death stare? Luckily, the veteran actor was the one who broke the silence. 

“At one point he goes, ‘Did you write that sketch?’”

“And I was like, ‘I did.’”

“He goes, ‘Pretty good.’”

And after that? More silence as the elevator passed the eighth floor… the ninth floor… the tenth… 

Fellow talk show host Norton felt Meyers’ pain. “I really like Robert De Niro, but he’s not that chatty,” he agreed. “He’s been on a number of times, and I’ve discovered, as you know, that he’s a benign presence. It’s not like he’s having a horrible time, he’s having a nice time, he just doesn’t like to talk very much.”  

Unfortunately, “doesn’t like to talk very much” isn’t the greatest quality in a talk show guest. De Niro’s reticence was so pronounced that Norton was shocked when the guy finally broke down during his fourth appearance and started to tell a story. “He was having such a nice time, he started to tell an anecdote,” Norton explained. “And we were like, ‘Oh my God, Robert De Niro’s telling an anecdote!’”

As it turns out, it was a lousy, meandering story. “It was going on for some time and then, bless him, he could tell that, ‘Oh, this is spaghetti in my head,’” Norton remembered. “And then he looked at me and went, ‘Why am I telling this?’”

Meyers would probably have killed for a rambling story in that elevator, but it wasn’t meant to be. The doors eventually opened, and the SNL rookie made his escape. “When I got off, I’m like, ‘That’s either the best or worst thing that ever happened to me,’” Meyers said. “I’ll go with best.”