How Robert De Niro tackled playing two mobsters in ‘The Alto Knights’
nypost.comThe Irishman.” At first, the more restrained plan was for De Niro to solely play Costello, the boss of the Luciano crime family in New York from 1937 to 1957. “Irwin Winkler one day said, ‘Well, what do you think about the idea of Bob playing both roles?
Playing Frank and Vito?” Levinson recalled. “And you go, ‘Well, this could be intriguing. I wonder what’s going to happen here.
Let’s see what Bob’s reaction is.’ And then Bob responded to it a couple days later, and we proceeded from that point on.”For Vito, who was the Luciano boss in 1936 before fleeing to Italy, De Niro lends his voice a higher pitch and speaks much faster and more aggressively.
He also wears prosthetics to change the appearance of his face.“We’re not doing a comic book character or anything like that,” Levinson said of the shape-shifting makeup. “We need a character you believe that’s the way he looks.
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