Not even De Niro or Tom Hardy could crack the gangster Hollywood keeps casting
Three acting heavyweights — Tom Hardy, Robert De Niro and Rod Steiger — played the same real-life figure in different films, and somehow all three come up short.
Al Capone has always been a tough nut to crack for Hollywood, hasn’t he? You’d think with all the talent we’ve seen have a go—De Niro, Steiger, even Tom Hardy—someone would manage to actually capture what made him tick. Instead, what we keep getting is the odd decent performance tangled up in either forgettable films or, frankly, outright misfires. Let’s take a look at the three most famous attempts, plus a few also-rans, and why they just haven’t quite nailed Chicago’s so-called ‘Scarface’.
Steiger: Gritty, but the film’s a slog
The first high-profile attempt came back in the fifties. Rod Steiger starred in ‘Al Capone’ (1959), a bog-standard Prohibition gangster biopic with aspirations of being ‘unvarnished’ but mostly just feeling cheap. Made on a shoestring budget (something like $550,000 at the time—less than most modern car adverts), it starts in 1919 and trudges through Capone’s climb in the Chicago underworld, with Steiger as Capone bouncing off Italian mafia kingpins like Johnny Torrio and ‘Big Jim’ Colosimo.
To be fair, Steiger gives it some welly, playing Capone as an ice-cold brute, not some romantic antihero. The New York Times rubbished his take (one reviewer dubbed him an ‘odious skunk’—subtle), but critics at Variety thought it was among his better roles at that stage. Steiger went on to do much stronger work later in his career, but looking back, this might be the closest any actor’s come to the cold reality of Capone—if only the film around him wasn’t so stuck in second gear.
Al Capone’s 1959 outing starred Rod Steiger and was made for just $550,000—about $6.5 million in today’s money.
De Niro: All-in, but too much
Fast-forward to the eighties and suddenly you’ve got Robert De Niro stepping in for Brian De Palma’s ‘The Untouchables’ (1987). This one’s a properly big deal: Kevin Costner as hero cop Eliot Ness, Sean Connery actually winning an Oscar as grizzled Irish cop Jimmy Malone, and De Niro tasked with giving Capone some heft as the villain on the rise. The film was a massive hit—made for $25 million, it hauled in $187 million at the box office and got rave reviews.
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De Niro, always one to go the extra mile (or ten), put on about 30 pounds, shaved his hair, and even hunted down Capone’s real-life tailors to get the silk undies spot-on. Method to the max. Unfortunately, what we got in the end was less a gangster, more a Saturday morning cartoon baddie. Sure, he’s physically convincing and the fits look great, but Capone’s depth just isn’t there. The screenplay—David Mamet, no slouch—chucks in iconic but wildly fabricated moments, like the baseball bat dinner scene. De Niro’s only just had a week to step in after Bob Hoskins got dropped at the last minute, so you can maybe forgive him, but it’s all amp and little nuance.
Even so, compared to what came three decades later, it’s practically Shakespeare.
Hardy: The car crash years
Josh Trank’s ‘Capone’ (2020) offers Tom Hardy—who’s usually great—a go at playing the crime boss as an ageing, washed-up wreck in Florida, plagued by dementia, syphilis, and embarrassing flashbacks of his glory days. Hardy delivers one of his trademark anti-performances, hiding beneath a ton of prosthetics and mumbling his way through. It’s like he’s allergic to enunciation. For a film that could’ve uncovered Capone’s damaged psyche, it just feels relentless, dreary, and at times, totally incomprehensible.
Bad luck meant it skipped cinemas for VOD thanks to Covid—actually, maybe a blessing considering the reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, it can only scrape 40%; Metascore, a damning 46. On IMDB, down at 4.7. The Hawaii Film Critics Society even put it up for worst film of the year—they gave that indignity to Wonder Woman 1984 instead, for what it’s worth. Some critics tried to defend Hardy’s oddball approach; most didn’t bother. One described him as ‘laugh[ing] in the face of conventional notions of good v. bad acting’. Another put it as ‘a mumbly Method showboat performance that’s authentic on the surface, but there isn’t enough beneath the mob mannerisms’.
One of Hardy’s harshest reviews labeled the performance 'a mumbly Method showboat' and said it barely scratched at Capone’s true character.
If there’s a pattern here, it’s this: Everyone nails the suits, the walk, the scowl—but nobody quite manages to hint at what made Capone, Capone. Even the greats can’t always decode an enigma when the script’s not much help and the makeup budget swallows the soul of the role.