The 1978 Vietnam War drama The Deer Hunter is lauded for its taut, tension-filled storytelling and for its brutal honesty regarding the trauma and suffering experienced by American prisoners of war during the conflict – particularly Mike and Nick, played by Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken respectively. It also launched some cast members’ careers while burnishing others’ reputations. Here’s what the principal cast is up to today.
Robert De Niro
Arguably Hollywood’s greatest living actor, Robert De Niro’s career has had ups and downs since his performance as Mike in The Deer Hunter, but the former far outweigh the latter. Two years after The Deer Hunter, De Niro won his second Academy Award for his work in Raging Bull, playing legendary boxer Jake LaMotta. De Niro’s frequent collaborations with director Martin Scorsese would define much of his work for the next decade, but he also worked with other famous auteurs in this period, playing against type as a heroic air conditioning engineer in Terry Gilliam’s absurdist dystopian fantasy Brazil (1985), and as Al Capone in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987). Another standout performance for Scorsese in Goodfellas (1990) as gangster Jimmy Conway followed, but De Niro’s finest work in the early 1990s was in Penny Marshall’s exceptional drama Awakenings (1990), which told the story of the work of a doctor (Robin Williams) tasked with helping catatonic patients on a New York psychiatric ward; De Niro’s depiction of a patient who slowly regains consciousness bagged him an Academy Award nomination.
Further gangster films followed, including Casino and Heat (both 1995), and still more – so many, in fact, that as the 1990s came to a close, De Niro began to send himself up with Analyze This (1999), a comedy about a mafioso in therapy. De Niro’s subsequent dalliance with comic roles took up much of the following decade and a half and posted as many box office bombs as hits, most notably the icky, phoned-in Dirty Grandpa (2016). However, De Niro has recently returned to form, with acclaimed performances in Joker and in Netflix’s epic crime drama The Irishman (both 2019). De Niro received a Life Achievement Award from the Screen Actors’ Guild in 2020. Upcoming projects include Tony Goldwyn’s comedy-drama Ezra, which is due to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, and Brad Furman’s action movie Tin Soldiers, which is currently in post-production.
Christopher Walken
Unlike De Niro, Christopher Walken (Nick) had yet to get broader attention in Hollywood, having appeared sporadically in film since breaking into the entertainment industry as a child actor in the 1950s. Walken’s Oscar win for The Deer Hunter transformed him from a dependable character actor to one of Hollywood’s big names, and he became a frequent choice for oddballs and outcasts, as well as doing a neat line in sociopathic antagonists. His work as the Silicon Valley mogul Max Zorin in A View To A Kill (1985) almost singlehandedly redeems Roger Moore’s much-maligned final outing as James Bond, and his scenes opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns (1992) as Gotham’s resident megalomaniac Max Schreck are devilishly enjoyable.
Shortly afterward, Quentin Tarantino tapped Walken for a single scene appearance as a Vietnam War veteran in Pulp Fiction (1994). Walken also gained a massive dollop of cred for an appearance in the Spike Jonze-directed music video for Fatboy Slim’s 2001 single “Weapon of Choice,” showing his famous dancing chops with a riotous performance as a melancholic businessman. Having celebrated his 80th birthday earlier this year, Walken shows no signs of slowing down: he received a Primetime Emmy nomination for his work in Apple+’s sci-fi thriller Severance last year and is due to star next year in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, which is currently in post-production.
John Savage
Playing the third prisoner of war, Steven, was John Savage, who enjoyed steady work as a reliable character actor in TV and film from the 1980s onward. Savage notably starred in Oliver Stone’s Academy Award-nominated war film Salvador (1986) and also briefly appeared as a priest in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III (1990). Later, he worked with auteur Terrence Malick, who cast him in another Vietnam War epic, The Thin Red Line (1998), and again in The New World (2005). Notable television appearances included work on The X-Files, Star Trek: Voyager, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and more recently in Twin Peaks (2017) and Prime’s legal procedural Goliath (2018).
John Cazale
As Stanley, Cazale’s contribution to The Deer Hunter was in many ways the most poignant. Having appeared in just half a dozen films before being cast, Cazale had already made waves in Hollywood, being a go-to actor for Francis Ford Coppola – he appeared in three of Coppola’s films, playing Fredo in The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) – and his work in Sidney Lumet’s bank robbery drama Dog Day Afternoon (1975) earned him a Golden Globe nomination. Sadly, in 1978, he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He famously worked on the film at the insistence of Robert De Niro and fellow cast member Meryl Streep, with whom he was romantically involved. Cazale died on March 13, 1978, nine months before The Deer Hunter premiered; he never saw the completed film.
Meryl Streep
The third part of the love triangle linking Mike and Nick, Linda, is played by Meryl Streep. Streep had only lately come to prominence, having won a Primetime Emmy in 1978 for her work in NBC’s critically acclaimed miniseries Holocaust. Her knockout performance in The Deer Hunter earned her Oscar, Golden Globe, and BAFTA nominations, marking her out as hot property; the first of three Academy Awards followed in 1980 for her performance in the divorce drama Kramer vs. Kramer. A varied and glittering career has made Streep the most celebrated actress in Hollywood history, with a further 17 nominations in comedies, genre films, and romantic dramas. Recent work has included a fabulous turn opposite Hugh Grant as the tone-deaf socialite Florence Foster Jenkins in the film of the same name (2017), as the President of the United States in the disaster film-cum-political satire Don’t Look Up (2021) and, on TV, as Loretta in the critically acclaimed third season of Only Murders in The Building (2023).
George Dzundza
As the hometown friend who never went to war, George Dzundza’s character John spends much of The Deer Hunter struggling to understand the enormity of his friends’ suffering. Dzundza worked steadily in Hollywood in supporting and minor roles, including solid work as a hardboiled detective in Basic Instinct (1992) and opposite Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington in the submarine thriller Crimson Tide (1995). In 2002, almost a quarter of a century after The Deer Hunter, he reunited with De Niro in Michael Caton-Jones’ crime drama City By The Sea (2002). Dzundza’s TV work included recurring roles in Law and Order, Hack, and Grey’s Anatomy. Dzundza retired from acting in the early 2010s after a career spanning almost 40 years.
