So Robert De Niro walked out of an interview this week with the Radio Times, citing the “negative inferences” of his inquisitor, Emma Brockes, who had dared to ask how he keeps from going into autopilot mode during long days on set. Oh dear. I expect this will not be the outcome that Warner Bros, the studio behind his new comedy The Intern, was hoping for.
Had De Niro been promoting a gangster movie or anything else where he gets to wave a gun around, then his behaviour would have been entirely on-message. In the Seventies and Eighties, he excelled at chin-and-jaw acting, concentrating all his tension and fury into the area around his mouth. But that doesn’t really work for comedy.
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