Silence was a deeply personal film for Martin Scorsese, to the point where he even wanted to appear onscreen in it.
Scorsese doesn’t generally cameo in his films, though he did make one in his daughter’s micro-budget superhero movie last year.
The somewhat esoteric Silence, which centred on Jesuit priests in 17th century Japan, failed to make a big impact at the box office. Scorsese’s next two films are likely to though – The Irishman, a Netflix-produced mob drama starring Robert De Niro and The Devil in the White City, a serial killer thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
The auteur made a very brief, non-speaking and uncredited cameo in one of the movie’s final scenes, playing a European visitor to Japan looking on as a defeated Ferreira (Liam Neeson) and Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) sort religious iconography.