10 Actors DE-AGED For Huge Movie Roles

In an unprecedented move (at the time), Netflix gave New York auteur Martin Scorsese a blank paycheque to make his epic real-life gangster movie The Irishman.

In order to tell the story of truck driver Frank Sheeran, whose involvement with a Pennsylvanian crime family leads him to become a hitman and fixer working for the Teamster Jimmy Hoffa, Scorsese insisted on using the same actors beginning to end, rather than taking the tried-and-tested route of swapping out the part to fit the age.

It would seem to make sense, then, to choose a middle-age cast, who could conceivably play all stages of the character without too much trouble - a little makeup here, a little de-ageing there. But no. Scorsese instead assembled a hefty squad of his old favourites, with Robert De Niro front and centre as Frank.

Employing a ridiculously expensive and previously unexplored motion capture technology, the team (led by George Lucas's ILM) enabled De Niro to play the mob assassin throughout. The digital de-ageing process allowed De Niro and the other actors to be filmed on camera as they normally would, without the sort of rigging or visual impediments this kind of technology usually calls for; the actors were coached on how to walk, move, gesture and carry themselves like younger men, and their voices were edited in post-production.

And, you know what, they just about got away with it too!