Robert De Niro has sparked controversy after a video emerged in which fans theorized he was confronting a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the set of his new Netflix series, "Zero Day," in Manhattan.
The video posted to X, shows the actor shouting, "This is not a movie. This is real."
He continued, "And if you're going to keep talking nonsense, then you gotta go home," adding, "They said they want to do October 7 again. You don't want that."
De Niro has previously voiced support for Israel and maintained lifelong friendships with the late Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and the late President Ezer Weizman, the Jerusalem Post reported, which is why social media users believed that the actor was taking a stance against pro-Palestinian protesters, with fans praising him for "standing up to the Hamas supporting rabble protesting."
However, actor Mozhan Navabi, who appears next to De Niro in "Zero Day," clarified that the actor was just speaking lines from the upcoming limited series. She made the comments on social media in response to a report by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which presented the clip as De Niro speaking out to demonstrators.
"Robert Deniro is giving a speech as his character in the upcoming Netflix show Zero Day. I'm also in it, and when I saw the clip, I recognized the speech. It's fiction. Please verify before you publish," she wrote on X.
De Niro's PR representative Stan Rosenfield confirmed that the actor was "only reading his lines in character" for the Netflix production. "He was not speaking to demonstrators but only speaking his lines as written in the script." he said.
De Niro serves as producer of "Zero Day," which according to the logline, is a conspiracy thriller that asks the question, "How do we find truth in a world in crisis, one seemingly being torn apart by forces outside our control? And in an era rife with conspiracy theory and subterfuge, how much of those forces are products of our own doing, perhaps even of our own imagining?"