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Sun 30 August 2026 22:30, UK
He counts some of the most immortal roles of the New Hollywood era, yet there’s one role which has followed Robert De Niro all his life due to its curious footnote.
Character preparation has been a hallmark of De Niro’s method approach to performance. To better get inside the disturbed mind of alienated cabbie Travis Bickle, De Niro applied for a genuine New York hack license and worked 12-hour shifts around the city ahead of the Taxi Driver shoot. To step into the shoes of the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, De Niro learned all the required Italian dialogue in the Sicilian accent and even adopted the first movie’s Marlon Brando’s mumbled vocal delivery on top.
But the New York actor broke new ground with 1980’s Raging Bull. For the role of abusive boxer Jake LaMotta, De Niro got into incredible shape, trained by LaMotta himself at Manhattan’s Gramercy Club, and even won some fights as a middleweight boxer. It was a role he’d been chasing as early as 1974, hooked on the Raging Bull: My Story autobiography and eager to step into the role of a fighter in all its fraught complexity.
However, the second half of Raging Bull documents LaMotta’s fall from grace, as he loses his boxing prowess and intimidating physique in a downward spiral of alcohol abuse in the midst of his failing professional and private life. Ever committed to the role, De Niro signed up to pile on the pounds required for LaMotta’s overweight latter years with the same dedication as his lean cut for the sequences in the ring.
The solution? Production was closed for nearly four months, with all the crew paid, so De Niro could travel around Italy and France eating as much as he could, reportedly consuming all the pasta, cheesecake and vanilla milkshakes he could stomach and staying well away from any training gym. The results spoke for themselves when filming resumed in December 1979 for the remaining few weeks of La Matta’s out-of-shape, washed-up rock bottom.
“The first 15-20 pounds, you know, you eat and overindulge, to say the least,” De Niro told CBS News in 2013. “And then after that, it’s just pure drudgery, work.”
De Niro’s weight increased to as much as 215 pounds, pulling him to such a degree of ill-health that his struggled breathing and talk compelled director Martin Scorsese to hurry the shoot along in order to relieve De Niro of his physical ailments.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Yet, just as his prior boxing muscle lent authenticity on screen when in the ring and acting the tyrant in the domestic sphere, LaMotta’s collapse into irrelevance is perfectly captured by De Niro’s holidaying diet, a has-been whose temper cost him everything as he wallows in regret amid empty bottles and bad food.
The questions of De Niro’s weight gain followed him throughout his career from then on, with every other interview seemingly never getting enough of the actor’s recount of the punishment his body went through to play the troubled and destructive “Bronx Bull”.
