Former Daredevil actor Vincent D’Onofrio reveals his life-long fear of monkeys. In a bizarre Twitter thread, the actor details the context of the story, and how it still affects him to this day.
Now 59-years-old, D’Onofrio was raised in Brooklyn, New York. In 1987, the Italian-American actor delivered a breakthrough performance as Private Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence in Stanley Kubrick’s war film Full Metal Jacket. In recent years, D’Onofrio portrayed Detective Robert Goren on NBC’s Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Wilson Fisk aka Kingpin on Netflix’s Daredevil. Earlier this year, D’Onofrio shared a Daredevil fan petition to save the show after it was cancelled. In November, D’Onofrio expressed his desire to portray Lex Luthor in a future DC project, and later stated that he wants to work with Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi. Now, the actor has expressed his desire to stay far and clear from a specific group of mammals in the animal kingdom.
On Twitter, D’Onofrio posted a 22-message thread about his fear of monkeys. For context, the dramatic story begins with the note “Just for a laugh,” suggesting that the actor was not in fear of actively being stalked by monkeys. D’Onofrio proceeds to openly discuss “monkeys and their ability to scare the SH*T out of me.” From there, he goes back in time to “a horrible place, a torture chamber of sorts,” which is first established as being a “monkey petting place” in Florida. D’Onofrio recalls the “severe torture,” and that the “amounts of monkey poo everywhere was unbearable,” even claiming that said poo “squirted down upon the visitors.” Click on the tweet below to read D’Onofrio’s lengthy full thread.
In the thread, D’Onofrio antagonizes the monkeys, but doesn’t call out one specific monkey by name. Instead, he merely states that their faces “resembled something between Teddy Rosevelt and Mo from the three stooges.” By this point, the thread has only reached tweet nine of 22. By the end, the monkey narrative shifts from Florida to Rio de Janeiro, which D’Onofrio describes as “a wonderful city.” He also recounts being surprised by a two-foot monkey with “the face of Mo from the three stooges sliding with a scraping sound down the side walk.” By the end, D’Onofrio vividly remembers “screaming and the vision of monkey spit running in my mind.”
A fear of monkeys is known as pithecophobia. For movie fans experiencing the same thoughts as Daredevil’s Vincent D’Onofrio, the following movies should be avoided: Planet of the Apes (1968), Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), and Curious George (2006).
More: The Predator Artwork Reveals Bizarre Monkey Hybrids
Source: Vincent D’Onofrio
