To prepare for their roles in The Wizard of Lies, premiering tonight on HBO, Michelle Pfeiffer felt it necessary to meet Ruth Madoff, while Robert De Niro declined to meet Bernie Madoff.
Speaking at a “The Hollywood Reporter TV Talk” at 92Y in New York, Pfeiffer said she was “very grateful and surprised” that Ruth Madoff was willing to meet her. She found her “understandably guarded and incredibly gracious with her time. I shared my reluctance to reach out to her, that I didn’t want to intrude. Her response to me was, ‘It would be very strange not to want to meet me if you were playing me.’’’
Pfeiffer found her to be “very funny, very fun-loving and childish.”
She also found replicating Ruth Madoff’s accent “one of the harder ones. It’s not consistent. Queens is just challenging, some sounds are just hard. If you’re not careful, the accent could become a caricature.”
Discussing his decision not to meet Bernie Madoff, De Niro, on the other hand, said that “of course, you always want to meet the person you’re playing. But in this case I was very wary. There were a lot of restrictions around interviewing him.’
He also felt “it would be a mixed message” if he did, that it would constitute “endorsing him.”
However, he did meet “a lot of people around him, his in-laws, relatives, his lawyer. I watched video stuff.” He added that he did not meet any of Madoff’s victims, though he has friends who were.
Diana B. Henriques, author of The Wizard of Lies, on which the TV film was based and a consultant on it, said she had to audition to portray herself in it.
She said that when De Niro entered to read with her, he was “casually dressed, a little unshaven. It couldn’t have been more than 40 seconds into the scene when his face changed. He did something with his face that made him Bernie Madoff. It was surreal, creepy.”
Barry Levinson, director of the film and an executive producer of it, with De Niro and Jane Rosenthal, called the “family dynamic” the center of it, “how Bernie deals with his boys, how Bernie deals with his wife. The boys don’t know certain things.”
“Ruth met him at such a young age. There was always a connection to Bernie. Then all of a sudden one day their world was turned upside down,” he said.
