Robert De Niro makes TV debut in Zero Day, but hesitant on future TV roles

NEW YORK – After a six-decade career, Taxi Driver (1976) actor Robert De Niro is starring in his first television series, but he is not convinced he would do it again.

“I don’t know. It’s a lot of work. It’s like doing three features back to back,” said the veteran American actor, 81.

De Niro portrays a former American president in the political thriller Zero Day, which explores themes of truth and disinformation. The six-episode series, which also stars American actors Angela Bassett and Jesse Plemons, is showing on Netflix.

His character leads the Zero Day Commission in the wake of a cyber attack that has inflicted chaos upon, and claimed thousands of lives in, the United States.

American actor Matthew Modine, who plays a politician, said the show’s plot reflected how trust was being lost in institutions.

“It’s not the question of if a cyber attack will happen on the US or in some other country around the world. It’s when,” he added.

Preparation for the role was intense, says De Niro.

“It was a lot of work to learn all that and a lot of it was exposition, especially in certain parts,” he said. “There wasn’t much room for paraphrasing and stuff like that, or ad-libbing... But it was worth doing, you know?”

The show was filmed during the last US presidential election campaign, and creators Noah Oppenheim and Eric Newman said they were surprised how much art seemed to imitate life.

“Every day we’d be on set, and whether it was election-related news or just some other event in the world, we would see things happening that when we had written about them in the show, we had thought were fictional, you know, fancies and pieces of speculation,” said Oppenheim, who was behind the screenplay of Jackie (2016), which starred actress Natalie Portman as former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

“And then we watched as these things unfolded in the real world.” REUTERS