Robert De Niro to NYT reporter: ‘Ya got the part, kid’

“Ya got the part, kid.”

It’s safe to say few journalists have rarely heard those words, at least not from Robert De Niro.

But that’s the case for New York Times reporter Diana Henriques, author of a book about Bernie Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme, “The Wizard of Lies.” She took a buyout from the newspaper in 2011 but still writes for it.

HBO is adapting her book, with De Niro starring as Madoff, and she auditioned with him several months ago, Chris Roush reports for Talking Biz News.

…In June, and he grilled her for two hours about his mannerisms, his laugh, his sense of humor, and his relative closeness to his two sons.

De Niro and his casting director liked how it went well enough to ask her back the next day to read a scene with him. According to the journalist:

The next day, De Niro met us in the same small office. We sat knee to knee; he had a script to follow, I was relying on memory. But about a minute into a 5-minute scene, he seemed to just drop out of his own head and into Bernie’s. It was a surreal, goosebumpy moment — and he’s barely started on building his characterization!

We finished the scene, looks were exchanged among Levinson, Chenoweth and De Niro. After a bit of vague chit-chat, I got blunt (not an investigative reporter for nothing!) So, I said, what’s the decision? DeNiro gave me his patented smirk: “Ya got the part, kid.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story left the space out of Robert De Niro’s last name. It has been corrected.