During the latest episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Robert De Niro chatted about his decades-long career, revealed a project he missed out on and shared his thoughts on the upcoming 2024 election.
The Oscar-winning actor kicked off his appearance by reacting to the Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union address Thursday night, when Alabama Sen. Katie Britt delivered a criticism of the president and his administration’s policies.
“I don’t understand why they’d even have someone like her do it,” De Niro said. “I mean, it was so lame.”
Following the primary elections in several states on Tuesday signaling another rematch between Biden and Donald Trump in November, Maher also asked the Killers of the Flower Moon star his perspective on the upcoming election — and De Niro had one question for his fellow Americans.
“We wanna live in a world that we want to live in and enjoy living in, or live in a nightmare? Vote for Trump and you’ll get the nightmare, vote for Biden and we’ll be back to normalcy.”
He added, “I just don’t want to feel the way I did the many months after the election in 2016, where we couldn’t believe that it happened. The guy [Trump] is a total monster and anybody… I don’t understand it, I guess they get behind that kind of logic they wanna fuck with people, screw them because they’re unhappy about something. He’s such a mean, nasty, hateful person.”
De Niro also admitted that he would “never” play Trump as an actor because he “can’t see any good in him. Nothing, nothing at all, nothing redeemable.”
The Goodfellas actor concluded, “The bottom line is Biden’s our guy. He represents what this country’s supposed to be about.”
Earlier during his conversation with Maher, the host also pointed out that De Niro, who is 80, is nearly the same age as 81-year-old Biden. Concerns about the president’s age have been a major talking point ahead of the 2024 presidential election, so Maher wanted to ask the actor, who’s still very busy in Hollywood, how he continues to keep going.
“I’m very busy. I enjoy it. I don’t mind it,” De Niro responded. “I keep going because I know if you don’t keep going, you’re gonna atrophy and you’re gonna dry up and I don’t wanna do that. So I’m just trying to keep as busy as I can.”
Following his breakout role in 1973’s Bang the Drum Slowly and then in Mean Streets, De Niro became one of the most revered actors in the film industry. Not only has he played dozens of iconic roles throughout his career, but he’s also a serial Martin Scorsese collaborator, including his most recent role in Killers of the Flower Moon which earned him another Oscar nomination.
But De Niro revealed to Maher there’s another critically acclaimed film he nearly starred in: The Silence of the Lambs. The actor said he was asked to play Anthony Hopkins’ Dr. Hannibal Lecter, but he took too long to decide.
“I could have played that part but I waited so long and I was thinking, I was like, ‘Just give me a little longer.’ And the next thing he said… he just cast it,” De Niro recalled of the Jonathan Demme-directed film. “I don’t regret it. It’s just, that’s what happened.”
The other guests on the latest episode of Real Time were Max Brooks and Tara Palmeri.
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