Robert De Niro will be digitally de-aged for The Irishman

By Katie Rife | May 9, 2017 | 8:03pm

Aux Features Film

For his next film collaboration with Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro will be doing something that’s more Lucasfilm than Raging Bull. For the duo’s new Netflix movie The Irishman, 73-year-old De Niro will be playing Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, the labor union official and alleged hit man who confessed to killing Jimmy Hoffa shortly before his death in 2003. The book the film is based on, I Heard You Paint Houses, covered the entirety of Sheeran’s life; the majority of the film takes place in the 1970s, when Sheeran was in his 50s, but De Niro says parts of the film will flash back to earlier decades, and he’ll be digitally de-aged for those scenes.

That’s according to reports in Collider and Indiewire, which also say that Industrial Light & Magic, the company that brought Peter Cushing back from the grave in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, will be responsible for peeling away the decades from De Niro’s famous face using reference materials from his more than 50-year acting career. Scorsese and De Niro will begin filming The Irishman this August alongside co-stars Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, and Harvey Keitel. The film isn’t due until 2019, though, presumably to make plenty of time for De Niro’s digital face lift.