Robert De Niro makes first TV appearance in ‘Zero Day’

Robert De Niro

Legendary actor Robert De Niro opens up about TV debut.

Robert De Niro, who has a longstanding acting career in film, made his debut in a TV series.

The 81-year-old star detailed his experience in the Netflix series Zero Day, which began streaming on Thursday.

When asked if he would consider working on TV again, the Taxi Driver actor shared that he is on the fence about it.

“I don’t know. It’s a lot of work. It’s like doing three features back to back,” said De Niro.

De Niro plays a former United States president in the series which follows his character as he leads De Niro’s character leads the Zero Day Commission in the wake of a cyberattack that has inflicted chaos and caused mass destruction in the country.

Shedding light on the preparation of his role, the Godfather II actor said, “It was a lot of work to learn all that and a lot of it was exposition, especially in certain parts. There wasn’t much room for paraphrasing and stuff like that, or adlibbing. But it was worth doing, you know?”

The series was filmed during the last presidential election campaign, and the creators Noah Oppenheim and Eric Newman noted how close to life was the show.

“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.