Henry Winkler Was Shocked Robert De Niro Remembered Their First Meeting 40 Years Later: ‘I Dropped the Camera’

Even Henry Winkler gets starstruck!

Winkler, 78, recently told “one of my favorite Hollywood stories” — the story of how he first met Robert De Niro — on the Wednesday, Oct. 9, episode of Kelly Ripa’s podcast SiriusXM’s Let’s Talk off Camera with Kelly Ripa. During the interview, he shared that De Niro, 81, surprisingly remembered exactly what they spoke about when they crossed paths again decades later.

“So Ron Howard and I are walking down the street on Paramount,” Winker explained, recalling that he and Howard were taking a break from rehearsals for Happy Days, the 1970s ABC sitcom they costarred in at the time. “Leaning against the doorframe is Robert De Niro, he’s doing a scene from Godfather II.”

“I said to Ron, we’ve got to go and say hello,” Winkler recalled. Though Winkler was already a working actor by the early 1970s, De Niro’s career was just beginning to take off — Winkler even said that De Niro’s 1973 movie with Martin Scorsese, Mean Streets, was the first movie he was ever invited to screen after he began working in Hollywood.

“Okay, so we go up and we say hello and we are finished and we’re going to walk away and I turned around and I said, ‘Mr. De Niro, I just have to tell you, you use the word ‘f—‘ better than anybody on the planet,’ ” he added.

As Winkler explained, when he crossed paths with De Niro again at a premiere for the two-time Oscar winner’s 2015 movie The Intern decades later, De Niro still remembered their exact conversation from the ’70s.

“We go to the premiere party, [wife Stacey Weitzman] and I, and against the back wall, Robert De Niro is wearing one of those Irish caps,” Winkler recalled. “I walk up to him. I turn, I stand against the wall. I’m looking at him and I said, I have to ask you — like every fan has asked me – I need to take a selfie with you. He said, ‘Okay.’ I get my camera out. I’m taking the selfie. And he says, ’40 years ago, you said I used the word f— better than anybody,’ ” 

“I dropped the camera,” Winkler said of his reaction. “I went, ‘He remembers. Oh my God, I exist. Oh, this is the most amazing thing.’ That’s my great story.”

New episodes of SiriusXM’s Let’s Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa are available every Wednesday on the SiriusXM app and wherever podcasts are available.