watch the trailer for The Irishman.įor years, The Irishman was little more than a rumour plagued by delays, distractions and drop-outs, it looked odds-on never to make it out of the starting gate. ‘Mob life as an agonised stations of the cross’. “We’ve known each other for a really long time.” “Wow,” says Pacino at one point, casting his mind back across the pair’s career-long relationship. Today, they have rolled into London as the main attraction on the press roadshow for The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s monumental new gangster picture – and there is a lot to get through. Or that is what we would like to believe, anyway.
The pair – the film industry’s equivalent of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – are bona fide living legends, the greatest US actors of their generation, able to wipe the floor with modern lightweights such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Daniel Day-Lewis. That is, until we got on to the matter of a certain US president, of which more later. Pacino speaks in a barely audible bass rumble and is not short of waffle De Niro, while not exactly monosyllabic, spends as much time nodding with his distinctive pursed-mouth underbite and says as little as he can get away with. Observing them here, in an intimate room full of selected journalists, you see how their personalities contrast as much as their dress sense.
