Adam Scott has revealed that he once kept a picture of Robert De Niro in his high school locker, years before the two actors would eventually star together in Netflix’s The Whisper Man. The revelation adds an unexpectedly personal layer to Scott’s upcoming collaboration with one of Hollywood’s most revered performers.

For a young actor dreaming of making his mark in Hollywood, few things could feel more distant than sharing the screen with one of the industry’s most celebrated names. Scott’s story carries that rare sense of a childhood admiration eventually meeting an unexpected reality.

But there is more to Scott’s connection with De Niro than a childhood photograph. The story takes an even more surprising turn when Scott looks back at the kind of actor he wanted to become.

Speaking to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Adam Scott revealed that his admiration for Robert De Niro went back to his teenage years, when the legendary actor was already among the performers who shaped his cinematic ambitions.

“I literally had a photo of Robert De Niro in my locker in high school,” Scott recalled. The actor also kept pictures of Martin Scorsese and Al Pacino, turning his school locker into a personal shrine to the Hollywood icons he looked up to.

That admiration carried into Scott’s years at acting school, where he even considered giving himself a more starry-sounding name. He adapted his mother’s Sicilian maiden name, Corderaro, shortening it to Cordero and imagining how it might look alongside the names of the actors he idolized.

Scott recalled writing “Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Adam Cordero” in the acting school library during his appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The stage-name experiment ultimately went nowhere, and Adam Scott became the name audiences would know. Years later, however, he found himself in a position that the younger version of himself could hardly have imagined.

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And reaching that point did not make De Niro any less intimidating. In fact, Scott’s experience on The Whisper Man suggests that the awe never completely disappeared.

During his conversation with Jimmy Fallon, Adam Scott admitted that he was nervous about approaching Robert De Niro during the shoot. At one point, he called his wife and considered whether he should ask the actor about The Irishman, only for her to remind him that he was starring in a movie with De Niro, not standing around as an extra.

Scott eventually did ask De Niro about The Irishman, but the moment did not go quite as planned. De Niro answered, yet Scott was too nervous to press him for clarification, later admitting, “I’m not sure I understood what the answer was, which is fine.” The exchange captures just how strange the full-circle moment remained for an actor who had once kept De Niro's picture in his school locker.

That makes their pairing in The Whisper Man even more fitting. Scott plays Tom Kennedy, a widowed crime writer whose eight-year-old son is abducted, forcing him to seek help from his estranged father, a retired detective played by De Niro. Netflix describes the film as a crime thriller built around that father-son relationship and a decades-old serial-killer case.

For Scott, the journey from a high school locker to sharing the screen with De Niro is already a remarkable full-circle story. The fact that he was still starstruck enough to hesitate before asking his own co-star a question only makes it better.

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Scott’s story proves that even after making it to the other side of the dream, some Hollywood idols can still leave you speechless. Would you have had the nerve to ask De Niro about The Irishman? Let us know in the comments!