Robert De Niro busted wearing height-boosting shoes on the set of ‘The Irishman’

ONE of the world’s most famous actors wasn’t quite tall enough to play a real-life hitman in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming movie, so he got a boost from the wardrobe department.

ROBERT De Niro needed a bit of extra help from the wardrobe department on the set of his latest movie.

The actor was spotted wearing platform shoes on the set of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman which is currently being filmed in New York.

De Niro, who is 177cm tall, is portraying the real-life hitman Frank Sheeran who was 193cm tall.

Sheeran, who was nicknamed The Irishman, worked with the mob and claimed to have carried out 25 hits for them, including the murder of union boss Jimmy Hoffa.

The movie also stars Al Pacino, Bobby Cannavale, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel and will be the ninth film that De Niro and Martin Scorsese have made together.

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino filming Martin Scorsese's mob drama, The Irishman.

The legendary director has made several mob movies but told The Independent that The Irishman will have a different tone to his others.

“I think this is different, I think it is,” Scorsese said.

“I admit that there are — you know, Goodfellas and Casino have a certain style that I created for them — it’s on the page in the script actually. Putting Goodfellas together was almost like an afterthought, at times I was kind of rushing, I felt I’d already done it because I’d played it all out in terms of the camera moves and the editing and that sort of thing.

“The style of the picture, the cuts, the freeze-frames, all of this was planned way in advance, but here it’s a little different.

“The people are also older in The Irishman, it’s certainly more about looking back, a retrospective so to speak of a man’s life and the choices that he’s had to make.”

The script is based on the 2003 book I Heard You Paint Houses which Charles Brandt, a former Delaware police prosecutor, wrote after interviewing Frank Sheeran for several years.

The term “paint houses” is slang for killing people and refers to blood being splattered on walls.

The Irishman is a Netflix movie which is rumoured to be released in 2019.

Originally published as Robert De Niro busted wearing height-boosting shoes on the set of ‘The Irishman’