He is widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, but Martin Scorsese — at 83 years of age — appears to be quietly building a second, utterly unexpected legacy: that of a genuinely extraordinary character actor. Far from retreating into retirement, the legendary director has been turning up on screens large and small with increasing regularity, and the performances are starting to demand serious attention.
From TikToks to Star Wars: Scorsese Is Everywhere
It began modestly enough. Scorsese started appearing in his daughter Francesca's TikTok videos, and popped up playing a version of himself in the Emmy-winning series The Studio, where he maniacally pitches studio executives on a film about the Jonestown massacre. He even graced the cover of Charli XCX's latest album alongside John Cale and Marc Jacobs. None of it felt especially weighty — more like an endearing public figure having a late-life laugh at his own expense.
There was precedent for the self-deprecating cameo, too. A memorable appearance on Curb Your Enthusiasm saw him directing Larry David as a wise guy, leaning gleefully into his own cinematic persona. But something has shifted. The roles are getting meatier, and Scorsese is rising to meet them.
The Performances That Are Turning Heads
In Jonah Hill's film Outcome, Scorsese plays Red Rodriguez, an ageing Hollywood agent to child stars who operates out of a bowling alley. Opposite Keanu Reeves — who plays a troubled former child star returning to make amends — Scorsese delivers something unexpectedly affecting. Puffy-eyed, world-weary and holding on by a thread, his character knows he has served merely as a stepping stone in young careers, and possibly a morally compromised one at that. In one scene, he quietly reproaches Reeves for never staying in touch across the years, and somehow makes the audience feel the full weight of that abandonment.
Then there is his turn in Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, where he voices a fast-talking, four-armed fry-cook working a food truck in a city resembling Blade Runner's Los Angeles. It is a performance that plays directly to his strengths — that rapid-fire New York cadence and wiry, unhinged energy familiar from decades of documentary narration — and it works completely.
Most strikingly, in Julian Schnabel's adaptation of Nick Tosches' novel In the Hand of Dante, now streaming, Scorsese plays Isaiah, a 14th-century mentor to Dante Alighieri. Bearded, quiet and otherworldly, he mumble-whispers observations about time and folly with the gravity of a man who has genuinely lived through centuries. It may be his finest screen performance to date.
A Talent That Was Always There
None of this should come as a complete surprise. Scorsese has been quietly excellent on screen for decades. His cameo in his own Taxi Driver — a barely contained, cocaine-fuelled rage simmering in the back seat — reportedly stole a scene from Robert De Niro himself. He later played Vincent van Gogh in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, meditating gruffly on the compulsion that drives an artist. And for an entire generation, he remains best known as the anxious puffer fish in the animated film Shark Tale — a reminder, if one were needed, that range is not something Scorsese lacks.
What makes the current moment remarkable is that Scorsese does not appear to be chasing a new career. By most accounts, these roles are favours extended to fellow filmmakers, undertaken with the casual generosity of someone who has nothing left to prove. That lack of visible ambition may be precisely what makes the performances so disarming — and so good.
