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

NEW YORK: After a six-decade-long career, ‘Taxi Driver’ 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.

De Niro portrays a former U.S. president in Netflix’s limited series ‘Zero Day,’ which explores themes of truth and disinformation.

De Niro’s character leads the Zero Day Commission in the wake of a cyberattack that has inflicted chaos and claimed thousands of lives in the United States.

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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 cyberattack will happen on the United States or in some other country around the world. It’s when,” he said.

Preparation for the role was intense, according to 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 adlibbing… But it was worth doing, you know?”

The show was filmed during the last U.S. 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.

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

‘Zero Day’, which among others also stars Angela Bassett and Jesse Plemons, begins streaming on Netflix on Thursday.