Action Bronson Reveals Robert De Niro’s "Ball-Busting" Joke On Set of The Irishman

Action Bronson was momentarily stunned after his meeting with Robert De Niro while filming his part in The Irishman.

The award-winning rapper and actor, who plays a casket salesman in the 2019 Martin Scorsese crime epic, was pulled into a huddle by Robert De Niro prior to shooting his scene. Now he’s revealed to Men’s Journal exactly what the Hollywood icon told him.

“So we shot it and De Niro goes, ‘come here for a second, kid. You're really f****** everything up, man. We got to get somebody else?’ And I look at him, I was shocked. He goes, ‘Ah I was just f****** with you. You got this, go ahead.’ They’re real ball-busters.”

While Bronson’s best-known for his successful career as a rapper, songwriter, and record producer, he’s also got several films to his name. These include 2020’s The King of Staten Island with Pete Davidson, and upcoming Darren Aronofsky drama Caught Stealing, alongside Austin Butler and Zo? Kravitz. The latter is his most major role yet.

“It's a pretty sick line-up. I'm expecting lots of hardware on my mantle and I'm expecting more phone calls in my inbox,” says Action. “This was my favorite one because I really dug in. I wasn't just there as a beauty shot. I'm not just a gorgeous face. I can say things. They had more lines, they wrote me lines in, and it ended up being a really incredible thing.”

Caught Stealing follows a burned-out ex-baseball player (Butler) who finds himself embroiled in the criminal underbelly of 1990s New York City. It’s set for a 2025 release in theatres. Before then, Action has other projects on the go.

The biggest of which is his collaboration with Meta AI, which is helping him with another of his major passions: cooking. Action’s long-running cooking show, F*** That’s Delicious, is now in its sixth season over on his official YouTube channel, and the new AI assistant from Meta is another tool in his arsenal.

“Meta AI is just like Encyclopaedia Britannica right at your fingertips and more, as if you were speaking to a human encyclopaedia that could just help you through your times.”

Would Action ever incorporate Meta AI into his other projects? “I believe that there's room for everything there,” he says. “I think that this technology could be utilized in every facet, every type of commercialized situation, every real life situation.”

“I'm thinking about how I could use it on the farm, like in the Olive Grove, in the gym, on the construction site, literally trying to fix a Harley. You look at the motor and you just ask it, ‘show me what I'm looking at, tell me,’ and it tells you. And you can troubleshoot right there with your glasses or on the phone. It's pretty much next-level, man. It's blowing my feeble mind.”