He’s played mobsters, murderers, vigilantes and psychopaths. But the one person Robert De Niro said was too irredeemable to play? Donald Trump.
The outspoken Hollywood actor spoke about why he would not want Trump to become president again during an appearance on the Real Time With Bill Maher chatshow, in which he urged voters to vote for Joe Biden.
“The bottom line is, it’s Biden versus Trump. We want to live in a world that we want to live in and enjoy living in, or live in a nightmare,” De Niro said. “Vote for Trump and you’ll get the nightmare, vote for Biden and we’ll be back to normalcy.”
He continued: “I just don’t want to feel the way I did, and many of us don’t, after the election in 2016 where we couldn’t believe that it happened. The guy is a total monster.”
De Niro then went on to state that he would never play Trump.
“I’d never play him as an actor because I can’t see any good in him. Nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing redeemable in him,” De Niro said.
Trump is the last remaining leading candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination for president after Nikki Haley, a former UN ambassador, announced that she was pulling out of the race on Wednesday.
De Niro has frequently criticised Trump in the past, using his speech at the Gotham awards in December to speak out against him. “The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office, and he’s keeping up the pace with his current campaign of retribution,” he said. Trump responded on Truth Social by calling the two-time Oscar winner “a total loser” whose acting talents “have greatly diminished”.
De Niro is nominated for best supporting actor at this year’s Academy Awards for his role in Killers of the Flower Moon, in which he plays a cattle rancher who orchestrates the murders of wealthy individuals of the Osage tribe.
