Really, though, these were the anomalies. The majority of De Niro\u2019s projects have been forgettable, unedifying misses. Think The Comedian, in which he played a comedian, or The Alto Knights<\/a>, last year\u2019s plodding gangster flick in which De Niro gamely played two roles, without enough enthusiasm for either. Zero Day, the 2024 thriller series he fronted for Netflix, seemed to disappear, dissolving more or less anonymously into the streamer\u2019s ocean of content like all sewage pumped out of the British coast. The Whisper Man \u2013 a pulpy straight-to-streaming thriller in which De Niro plays a crime novelist and onetime serial-killer-catcher \u2013 is more of the same: a great actor slumming it in the minor leagues. Clunky, implausible and murkily lit, the film seems unable to capture De Niro\u2019s attention, the actor more or less sleepwalking through the deadly cat-and-mouse hunt. (Sloth-and-mouse might be more accurate.) Really, though, who\u2019s to blame him for taking roles like this? What seems at first to be evidence of De Niro\u2019s flimsy curatorial judgement really attests to a bigger problem. Where are the great roles being written for elderly men? Look around \u2013 they don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n If we were to take stock of all the great actors of his generation, De Niro, 83, is clearly not alone in his commitment to spending old age acting in sub-par movies. His Irishman co-star Al Pacino is another great actor stuck in a habit of mediocrity. Once-reliable character actors like Ed Harris or Tommy Lee Jones or Christopher Lloyd have faded into irrelevance, likewise former A-listers Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman (though for the latter two, misconduct allegations \u2013 which they\u2019ve denied \u2013 may have played a part). Sir Anthony Hopkins still finds the odd worthwhile role, including an Oscar-winning part in 2020\u2019s The Father, but a lot of less worthwhile parts to boot. (This month he\u2019s also, it\u2019s worth pointing out, released his first album<\/a>.) In the five dozen or so films that JK Simmons had made since winning the Oscar for Whiplash in 2014, has he had a great role since? Those who have avoided these late-in-life downturns have largely done so by retiring \u2013 actors like Joe Pesci, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson simply opted out, to varying extents. <\/p>\n It\u2019s significant, perhaps, that if you move down a generation \u2013 to the leading men now in their late fifties and sixties, the Brad Pitts and Tom Cruises \u2013 the big roles on offer now largely exist in action films. Their biggest roles are the same roles they would have been offered 20 years ago. Harrison Ford remains eminently employable in the world of franchise blockbusters \u2013 in sequels to Blade Runner, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones, or as (deep sigh) Red Hulk in the fourth Captain America film \u2013 but the meatier drama parts of his younger days have disappeared. Would it not be nice to see Ford in something with the heft and credibility of, say, Witness again? The same largely applies to Samuel L Jackson. It\u2019s not like there have never been plum roles for old actors. Think of Paul Newman in The Verdict. I struggle to think of the last time time a film like that got made.<\/p>\n For a while, the thinking was the television could be a life raft, the emergent trend of glossy, high budget \u201cprestige TV\u201d offering actors the sort of toothsome acting gigs the big screen no longer could. But while some older actors were able to temporarily capitalise \u2013 Steve Buscemi with Boardwalk Empire; Michael Keaton with Dopesick; Brian Cox with Succession \u2013 the bubble has seemingly burst. Now you have actors making futile inroads into streaming content at a time when the prestige has run dry. So when De Niro stars in Zero Day, or Ford stars in Shrinking, or Pesci stars in Bupkis, or Billy Crystal stars in Before (nope, me neither), no one really takes notice. There is too much TV now and none of it endures.<\/p>\n I\u2019m singling out men here simply because the dearth of qualities roles for older women is often taken as a given: it pretty much goes without saying that elderly female actors face the same lack of opportunities, only more intensely \u2013 and often without the sort of creatively-hollow-but-nonetheless-lucrative-and-widely-seen franchise offers that are politely extended to men. (The world, it seems, isn\u2019t ready for Mrs Red Hulk, played by, let\u2019s say, Dianne Weist.) <\/p>\n As with men, many of the biggest female actors have either slowed down their output, settled for sub-par projects, or migrated to television (or, often, a combination of these three things). Since 2018, Holly Hunter and Sissy Spacek have done just two movies apiece between them, Sally Field only three. (Though they\u2019ve all worked in streaming television.) Helen Mirren has continued to work prolifically in film, but dive into her recent filmography and it\u2019s basically all blockbluster schlock (Fast and Furious; Shazam! Fury of the Gods) or independent films with no critical or commercial cut-through. Sigourney Weaver, like Ford, has maintained a prolific presence in the multiplexes chiefly through franchise sequels (Avatar, Ghostbusters, Star Wars). Even Meryl Streep has seen the relentless conveyor belt of Oscar nominations seize up over the past decade. Something like this year\u2019s The Devil Wears Prada 2 reminds us just how much juice she\u2019s still got, but roles like these are becoming anomalies.<\/p>\n But of course, while this is no less urgent of a problem, Hollywood\u2019s aversion to writing good roles for older women is a known and acknowledged prejudice. With men, this is less true. It almost goes against perception: these are elder statesmen, after all. Who in the industry is more respected than Robert De Niro? But ageism in Hollywood is a silent blight. There is a generation of great actors wasting their final working years \u2013 it\u2019s about time we admitted it. <\/p>\n \u2018The Whisper Man\u2019 is streaming on Netflix<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":607263,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-607262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=607262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/607263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Robert](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-27-at-22-30-56.png\")
Robert De Niro in ‘The Whisper Man’ (Netflix)<\/p>\n![\"Adam](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/WHISPERMAN_20250522_31248_R.jpeg\")
Adam Scott and De Niro in ‘The Whisper Man’ (David Lee\/Netflix)<\/p>\n