Robert De Niro Gets Emotional When Talking About His Gay Dad

Robert De Niro is featured in the new issue of Out Magazine, and the 70-year-old actor breaks down into tears while talking about his late father, Robert De Niro Sr.

De Niro invited the magazine to his dad's former studio in New York City, which has been kept as a shrine for the past two decades. When asked about preserving the space, the Oscar winner said, "I didn’t think of just selling it and dismantling it. Luckily, I could afford to keep it going, so I left it as is ... I documented and went through everything to make sure we catalogued it, and then I said, 'I'm keeping it like this.'" He added, "I haven’t even read all the diaries — I started. I read the ones for the film, but I haven’t read all the other material. I will, of course."

The project he's speaking of is the upcoming HBO documentary, Remembering the Artist, which chronicles the life of De Niro's artist gather, who was gay. When asked about his father's sexuality, it's noted that the elder De Niro "thought being gay was a sort of affliction," and the actor is asked about his father feeling "conflicted about his life’s passion."

De Niro replied, "[Was he conflicted] about his homosexuality? Yeah, he probably was, being from that generation, especially from a small town upstate. I was not aware, much, of it. I wish we had spoken about it much more. My mother didn’t want to talk about things in general, and you’re not interested when you’re a certain age. Again, for my kids, I want them to stop and take a moment and realize that you sometimes have to do things now instead of later, because later may be 20 years from now — and that’s too late."

When asked about sharing the same name as his late dad (and becoming "more famous than the person you’re named after," as the reporter puts it), De Niro gets teary and says, "I get emotional. I don’t know why."

Check out the teaser for the documentary below!