At Vanity Fair’s dinner kicking off the Tribeca Film Festival, some of the guests reminisced about their first meetings with hosts Graydon Carter and Robert De Niro. Debra Messing was lucky enough to meet De Niro at an audition fresh out of NYU acting school. “My first film callback was for Casino, for the Sharon Stone role,” Messing said. She was to meet De Niro and Martin Scorsese. “I was 24 and had no money and was in school,” she explained. “And so I went to an uptown hair place and said, ‘Make me look like Ivana Trump.’ And I wore this very fancy — what I thought was a very fancy — black jumpsuit, and I was all ready to go, and I walked in and he looked at me, and he’s like, ‘What? You goin’ to a prom?’” Messing says that while it is funny in retrospect, it was painful at the time. “Every part of my soul just withered because I realized in that moment there was just no way that I was old enough to play that part. And I thought I tricked him; I thought that I had, you know, somehow stepped up and I was perfectly believable.”
