It is something, according to the logic of American filmmaking, which had to happen. As the US faces some of its most acute political challenges for decades, call for a fictional president who will provide succour for the nation: Martin Sheen’s erudite and judicious Jed Bartlet in The West Wing, for example; Bill Pullman’s Thomas J Whitmore, strapping himself into a jet fighter to smash aliens in Independence Day; Michael Douglas’s Andrew Shepherd, defying opponents and conventional morals by courting a glamorous lobbyist in The American President.
But Robert De Niro? Netflix’s new conspiracy thriller Zero Day has chosen cinema’s most distinguished portrayer of gangsters and paranoiacs to save, or at least salvage, the day in his role as former president George Mullen. The twisty, six-part series presents us with a world-weary commander-in-chief who retired after his first term in office following the death of his son, but is brought back to handle the political fallout of a cyber attack on the nation.
It is in truth a perfect role for late-stage De Niro: never has executive power seemed so burdensome, nor De Niro’s famously expressive features so harassed. It was, I say to him and showrunner Eric Newman on their visit to London, the complications of Mullen’s character that must have attracted him to the role. “Yeah, he is complex,” the actor replies. “But that is how life is.” Long pause.
The reductiveness comes as no surprise. De Niro, 81, has never been known for his expansive responses in interviews. He is affable and good-humoured, but a firm believer in the virtues of brevity.
It is the first time he has played a lead role in a television mini-series, and I ask if it presented any new challenges. “Well, you can do a lot more in six episodes. It’s like doing three feature films back-to-back. There is a lot of jumping from episode to episode. But [director] Lesli Linka Glatter was right on it, in every scene — ‘This is where we are, this is what has happened’ — to give us the right perspective.
“I liken it to swimming in the English Channel,” he says unexpectedly. “Swimming to England, looking up and not seeing England, and then looking back and not seeing France either. I can’t just stay here, I’ve got to keep swimming, I’ve just got to keep going and going, otherwise I’ll sink.”
It sounds scary.
“Yeah, it is. It is very anxiety-provoking. But that’s OK.”
The same can be said of Zero Day: from the first episode, quite apart from the cyber attack, Mullen has to overcome a populist podcaster, wily hedge funders, a possibly corrupt congressman, a naively liberal daughter and a brain problem that plays a Sex Pistols song over and over in his head, and which may be the first sign of dementia, or not.
I ask the two men if the brain malfunction was inspired by the debate over President Biden’s mental health in the run-up to last year’s election. “No!” they chorus simultaneously. “That happened when we were shooting,” says De Niro. “We were writing it in 2022 when it wasn’t even a factor,” adds Newman. “It was definitely a surprise to us.”
I am forced slightly to dance around any similarities between the series and real life, as the production team has insisted that there are no questions on the personal political views of either man. In De Niro’s case, this is barely a setback as he is already on record as one of the most voluble critics of President Trump, calling him, on various occasions, among other things, “an idiot”, “a clown”, “a jerk”, “a moron”, and a man who “does not belong in my city” (both men are from New York, and are otherwise spectacularly dissimilar).
I say I have spotted a couple of sly references to the parallel universe of real life: the name of Mullen, who has to deliver a much-awaited and controversial report to Congress on the cyber attack, is reminiscent of that of (Robert) Mueller, who also had a highly contentious report to compile during the first Trump presidency. A coincidence. “We wanted to distance him from any [real-life] president,” says Newman, straight-batting.
And the fiery, liberal Congresswoman daughter, played by Lizzy Kaplan, who is called Alexandra? A nod to Democratic New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? “I often use the letter A when I’m thinking of names. I don’t know why that is.” Noted.
Newman, who was behind the Narcos saga on the drug wars in Colombia, as well as last year’s crime series Griselda, is more loquacious on the overall theme of the series, which is the public’s relationship with the news, and ultimately the truth.
“There are now two versions — perhaps more — of the truth, rather than just one. But if truth is not objective, what is? For me, that inability to hold on to a single truth is way more terrifying than whatever disaster may befall us.”
Newman put the idea to De Niro, who duly hopped on board. George Mullen is essentially an admirable figure, firmly in the traditions of previous fictional leaders. But he finds himself in one moral quandary after another, leading, in a notable scene, to his approval of an act of torture.
“He is a good guy, with good intentions,” De Niro says. “He is trying to do what is right, but is not always able to because of reasons that are very human.” An acute sense of pragmatism, rather than any more obvious acts of heroism, is what defines this president, and De Niro conveys his internal struggles with a characteristically subtle touch. At the end of the dizzying twists in the story, he finds himself staring into the river, attempting to process what he — and the country — have gone through.
What is he thinking, I ask? “Someone told me that when presidents come to the end [of their presidencies], they are in a bit of a vacuum,” De Niro says. “Everything stops. What do you do? Make your library. Write your memoir. That’s what he is thinking.” Newman embellishes: “He’s the honest man who ends up alone.”
That kind of darkness of tone is rare in a contemporary political thriller, and reminded me of those classic 1970s paranoia films, I say. “Oh, we were inspired by those,” says Newman. “The Parallax View, Marathon Man, Three Days of the Condor. In that post-Watergate era, we saw what had been unthinkable until then, that the government could do some really terrible things. Which, by the way, it always had. We didn’t become the US by being sweethearts.”
And, of course, there was Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese’s 1976 masterpiece on New York’s moral depravity, which propelled De Niro to prominence. Did he realise at the time that he was making a state-of-the-nation work? “No, no, no. You can never tell what a reaction to a movie is going to be. But I’m a New Yorker, and the alienation that the character [Travis Bickle] feels, I felt that myself. Somehow I identified with that.”
De Niro’s next movie, set for release in March, is Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights, centring on two prominent New York Mafia figures, Vito Genovese and Frank Costello. I wonder what keeps bringing the actor back into the familiar, crime-infested territory of Mafia politics. Does he not feel he covered it all in his garlanded performances in films such as 1974’s The Godfather Part II and 1990’s Goodfellas?
“I was brought the script by people who I have worked with many times before, and who I have great respect for,” says De Niro. “And another element was that, as a kid, I actually hung out in the Alto Knights [a social club in Little Italy], the actual place. And then I was asked if I would consider playing both roles, Genovese and Costello, which was kind of interesting. I never thought of doing any more Mafia films or gangster films, but this was good stuff. So I said, ‘I’ll do it.’”
I finally say to him that, while researching his filmography, I noticed that his first film, in 1965, was directed by Marcel Carné, who made the 1945 romantic tour de force Les Enfants du Paradis, frequently described as one of the greatest films of all time. It was not a connection I had expected to find.
“Yeah, Three Rooms in Manhattan. I was an extra. I’ve looked for a picture of me in that. Somebody found one and I thought, maybe it might be me, but, nah.” Did he know about Carné’s classic? “I knew that he had directed it, but I hadn’t seen it.”
He remembers his scene well. “It was [set in] a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue. And what I kept noticing were these things that were not like a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue. They had this old-style espresso machine, which of course they would not have had.” It was there from the beginning, that famous concern for dramatic truth — and it shows no sign of leaving him.
‘Zero Day’ is on Netflix from February 20. ‘The Alto Knights’ is in cinemas from March 21
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