Cinema

Robert De Niro Can Play a Mafia Hitman but Not Trump

Robert De Niro tells Husam Sam Asi how he found Frank Sheeran’s reasons in The Irishman, why Scorsese can’t explain his method, and why Trump is the one man he could never play.

Husam Sam Asi 11 November 2019

Husam Sam Asi talking with Robert De Niro during promotion for The Irishman. — Husam Sam Asi with Robert De Niro.

Robert De Niro is famous for interviews that run on yes, no and maybe. He rarely laughs and seldom smiles. Since my first interview with him, I have found one thing that changes him: the name Martin Scorsese. Mention it, and the smile arrives and the stories start to flow.

Their partnership has produced nine films and turned both men into legends. It began in 1973 with Mean Streets, which gave De Niro his breakthrough as the reckless Johnny Boy. Taxi Driver followed in 1976, making him an international star and earning him his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor. He won the award for their fourth film together, Raging Bull, and was nominated again for Cape Fear. Goodfellas and The King of Comedy added to the legend. Then, after Casino in 1995, the partnership fell silent for almost a quarter of a century, until The Irishman.

“He was almost going to be a priest”

When I sat down with him at the Conrad hotel in New York, De Niro admitted that the two men could hardly be more different.

“Everybody does their thing, and Marty does his,” he said, smiling. “I’m not particularly religious. He’s religious. He was almost going to be a priest at one point; he was an altar boy. We come together where we have a common area, where we meet and do our thing together.”

Finding that common ground took years. De Niro could not join Scorsese on Gangs of New York or The Departed. When they finally had a film greenlit, about a retired hitman living on the West Coast, Scorsese began showing him old movies, among them a black-and-white Jean Gabin picture, to explain the style he had in mind. De Niro went off to read Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses, thinking it might help him with the character.

“When I read the book I said, ‘Marty, you have to read this,’” he recalled. “We said, no, this is what we should be doing.”

The book is the deathbed confession of Frank Sheeran, a Teamsters official and Mafia hitman who claimed he killed the union boss Jimmy Hoffa, who vanished in 1975. Investigators and historians have long dismissed much of it. For De Niro, it was the role of a lifetime, and Hollywood refused to pay for it. The studios balked at the budget, and only Netflix agreed to finance the film and give the two men full creative freedom.

He never lost hope, he told me, laughing. He remembered standing beside Scorsese at an event seven or eight years earlier, waiting for an answer, when Scorsese declared that the film was inevitable. Neither of them knew when. Scorsese went on to make Hugo and Silence, but The Irishman never left their minds.

A 76-year-old with a young man’s face

The film runs three and a half hours, and De Niro is in most of it, playing Sheeran from his twenties, as a soldier in the Second World War, to his final years in a nursing home. He called it one of the most ambitious projects of his career, matched among his films with Scorsese only by Raging Bull: a mosaic of eras pieced together, with the actors digitally de-aged and De Niro returning long after the shoot to record new lines while Scorsese edited.

Some critics complained that the 76-year-old moves like an old man wearing a young face. De Niro waves that away. He does not feel that old, he said, only sometimes. A movement coach on set tapped the actors on the back whenever they slouched and reminded them they were supposed to be 30 or 40. Some small things, he conceded, slip through however hard you try.

“Make it your own”

De Niro rarely talks about how he works. Scorsese told me he has no idea how De Niro does it: he is simply always there. So I asked De Niro to explain it himself.

Robert De Niro talks to Husam Sam Asi about his acting method, Frank Sheeran and Donald Trump.

“It’s hard for me to explain,” he said. “I try to see what this guy is about. There’s a relatively good amount of information about Frank, what he looked like. I heard some of his interviews and stuff, and I try to see the similarities between me and him. I always say you try to use the elements of yourself that can be used in the character. That’s what they say in actor’s terms: make it your own, personalise it, so that it gets more specific, as long as it’s within the character’s parameters.”

“Then I make a choice how he’ll do this or that, certain small things, how he speaks,” he added. “And once I get out there and do it, I don’t think too much about any of that.”

That method has given cinema some of its most notorious criminals: the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, which won him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, the Jewish gangster Noodles in Once Upon a Time in America, the professional thief in Heat and Al Capone in The Untouchables. Sheeran belongs in that gallery. In his book he confesses to killing German prisoners during the war, and he spent his career as a corrupt union official mixed up in racketeering.

“It’s not like you justify the character’s behaviour,” De Niro said. “You try to look at it from the character’s point of view. Like they say, everybody has their reasons. You’ve got to find out what his or her reasons are, and proceed accordingly.”

“He’s a good soldier, Frank. He does what he’s asked to do. He’s had experience in this work. That doesn’t make it easy, but it doesn’t make it as harsh as it would be for a person who’s not had what he went through in the Second World War.”

The one role he will never play

So I put it to him: if he can find a man’s reasons in a hitman who shoots his friend, could he play Donald Trump?

“That’s the only person I think I could never play,” he said. “There’s nothing redeeming about his character at all. It’s amazing. Nothing.”

The Irishman, he explained, is a story of loyalty and love between three men: Frank, the Mafia boss Russell Bufalino and Hoffa. “This president doesn’t have a clue what that’s about,” he said. Trump demands loyalty, De Niro added, the way a baby does.

That is the irony at the heart of the film. Sheeran’s loyalty to the Mafia ends, in his telling, with a bullet in his friend’s head. De Niro’s loyalty to Scorsese has lasted almost half a century and nine films. His performances turned Travis Bickle, Vito Corleone and Jake LaMotta into screen icons, and Frank Sheeran looks set to join them. Critics are already tipping him for an eighth Oscar nomination.