Nobody does an angry New Yorker like Robert De Niro. He’s been perfecting it on screen for half a century. Turns out he does a pretty convincing one off screen too. The Oscar winner says he’s got “no choice” but to leave New York City, and he’s not shy about who he blames.
Our reporter Alex Bruno caught up with De Niro on a gray afternoon outside his Tribeca office. The actor was wearing a navy overcoat and the expression of a man who’d just opened his accountant’s email.
“I’ve got no choice,” De Niro said before Bruno had even sat down. “Mamdani has consigned guys like me to the poorhouse,” De Niro told him, and then repeated it a second time, slower, in case the recorder missed it.
He meant Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose tax proposals aimed at high earners and big property owners have rattled the city’s upper crust. De Niro owns real estate, restaurants and a production company. Do the math. He has.
This is the part that’s got everybody smirking. During the race, De Niro was one of the bigger names cheering on Mamdani’s vision. Affordable this, free that, a fairer city for working people. He posted. He spoke. He went to the events.
He supported communism during the campaign, his critics like to say, even if that’s a stretch for what most people would call progressive policy. But now it is coming to his own pocket, and he does not find it funny at all.
Asked if he regretted the endorsement, De Niro rubbed his jaw for a long moment. “Look,” he said. “I believed in the idea. I didn’t think the idea would come knocking on my door with an invoice.”
Reaction online was swift and merciless. “You talkin’ to me? No, the tax collector is,” read one viral post. Another stitched his old Mamdani rally speech next to his new quote with a sad violin in the background.
A few people defended him, saying it’s fair to change your mind once you see real costs. But most folks just wanted to enjoy the irony. One commenter summed it up: “Sir, this is what you voted for. Respectfully.”
Even some of his Hollywood friends were reportedly giggling about it at a dinner in the West Village. Nobody would say who, naturally.
He hasn’t decided. Bruno pushed him on Florida, the usual escape hatch for disgruntled New Yorkers. De Niro made a face like he’d smelled bad fish. “Too hot,” he said. “Too many golfers.”
Maybe the Hudson Valley. Maybe Connecticut. Maybe he just complains loudly for a year and never actually moves, which, let’s be honest, is the most New York outcome of all.
Bruno asked a Manhattan tax accountant, who works with a lot of entertainment clients, what a guy like De Niro is actually facing. She didn’t give specifics, obviously. She did laugh a lot.
“Every one of my clients who cheered last year is calling me now,” she said. “They all say the same thing. ’I didn’t think it meant me.’”
That’s the quiet story under all the noise. Plenty of wealthy New Yorkers loved the slogans. Far fewer loved the paperwork. De Niro just happens to be the one famous enough, and loud enough, to say it on the record.
There’s something almost poetic about it. The city’s toughest-looking tough guy, done in not by a rival gang but by a spreadsheet. Scorsese couldn’t have written it better.
For now De Niro is staying put, muttering about the poorhouse, and probably triple-checking his receipts.
