Robert De Niro has always been a man of few words, infamously hard to interview given his disinterest in saying much of anything at all.
In the last few years, however, the Oscar-winning legendary actor has made his feelings and opinions known on a number of topics, some as contentious as the Trump administration and the link between vaccines and certain conditions.
His Gotham Awards speech and all the other times he’s called out Donald Trump
De Niro is not a fan of Donald Trump. He’s denounced the controversial former U.S. president multiple times in the past. Most recently, the actor called out Trump for being untruthful and spreading misinformation during his speech at the 2023 Gotham Awards.
Although this last instance made headlines due to De Niro accusing the Gotham Institute and Apple of cutting his speech, it was far from the first time he’s expressed his political views. At the Tonys in 2018, the first thing De Niro said when he got up on stage was “F*** Trump.” Before that, he’d called the Reality TV star and politician “totally nuts,” “a punk,” “a pig,” “a dog,” and “a con.”
The list goes on with De Niro repeatedly accusing Trump of being a “wannabe gangster,” only without a code of honor, and comparing him to Hitler and Mussolini. In October 2023, he sent a statement to a Stop Trump Summit in New York where he called Trump an “evil” man with “no sense of right or wrong” and “no regard for anyone but himself.”
When he made his feelings about Fox News clear as rain
De Niro’s interview with CNN in 2019 has become famous by now. He continued to criticize Donald Trump by questioning his sanity, but when reporter Brian Stelter asked him about the backlash he could face from outlets like Fox News, the Irishman actor did not mince his words. “F*** ’em, f*** ’em,” he dismissed, following it up with an apology after someone behind the camera was unable to hold back a shocked “Wow.”
Later, when discussing his CNN outburst with the Daily Beast, De Niro doubled down. “And I think about [Rupert] Murdoch, and what he did to this country. He’s an immigrant who became a citizen, and look what he contributed. Look what this guy did. It’s disgraceful—beyond disgraceful, beyond cynical. Fox News, it’s all about money and power. At what cost? And you’re not even an American. You’re someone who wanted to be an American, and this is what you gave us?”
His Golden Globes Cecil B DeMille Award acceptance speech
De Niro has played many a comedic role, but his jokes didn’t exactly land well at the 2011 Golden Globes where he was honored with the Cecil B DeMille Award for his illustrious career. The event had a reputation for being the raunchier answer to the Oscars at the time, much thanks to its trusted candid host Ricky Gervais.
You could say De Niro was simply following the atmosphere of the night, but making jokes about how all the waiters had been “deported” before the awards and how Homeland Security was busy performing body scans on Megan Fox went too far. Even the audience of celebrities quickly turned their roaring laughter into baffled and slightly disgusted “Ohs.”
De Niro’s suspicions of vaccines and Big Pharma
It would be unfair to group Robert De Niro in with all the out-of-touch “anti-vaxxer” conspiracy theorists that have taken over the internet in the last few years, but the actor has expressed some controversial views on the vaccination of children, particularly the administration of vaccines containing mercury.
Following the contested addition and consequential removal of the documentary Vaxxed to the line-up of the Tribeca Film Festival, which De Niro co-founded, the actor publicly clarified his perspective on the possible link between the MMR vaccine and autism. “As a parent of a child who has autism, I’m concerned,” De Niro said on TODAY, adding that he “[wants] to know the truth” and promote a dialogue that questions the established science. “I’m not anti-vaccine. I want safe vaccines,” he further explained.
However, as much as De Niro is not an “anti-vaxxer” he does question the CDC and Big Pharma’s transparency. “There’s a lot of information about things that are happening with the CDC, the pharmaceutical companies, there are a lot of things that aren’t said,” the actor stated. He has even gone on to offer $100,000 to journalists and investigators willing to look into the issue.
The revelations made in De Niro’s assistant’s workplace abuse and gender discrimination lawsuit
In Nov. 2023, a jury declared that Robert De Niro’s company Canal Productions must pay $1.2 million to the actor’s former personal assistant as reparations for subjecting her to toxic workplace conditions. Graham Chase Robinson accused De Niro, who was not personally found liable for the abuse in the end, of bullying her and of making inappropriate requests, among other things.
According to various sources, the actor shouted “Shame on you, Chase Robinson!” in the courtroom after denying he had ever been abusive or made any comments with lewd intentions. The most damning evidence, however, is a voicemail that Sky News made public where De Niro, in between many repetitions of the word “f***” and all its variations, called his former assistant a “spoiled f***ing brat.”