Alex Moshakis
Observer Magazine
Most recently, he sat down with the famously private (and famously gruff!) Robert De Niro to discuss his latest film, Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. The interview was completed shortly before the actors’ strike and in the week in which De Niro became a father again for the seventh time, aged 80. “It doesn’t get easier,” he said, with great understatement. De Niro was less reserved when it came to his hatred for Donald Trump: “A national disaster. How could he have become president? Why weren’t more Americans embarrassed or terrified? Fuck Trump!” It’s an entertaining and illuminating read with one of the greatest actors of our time, but Alex comes into his own when he turns the conversation to his subject’s male relationships and is fascinated by the father/son dynamic in particular. De Niro opened up and talked movingly about his relationship with his own late dad, and how it has informed what sort of father he is. At the beginning of the year, Alex interviewed the much-loved author Michael Rosen to discuss his memoir and his son, who died suddenly in his late teens. The interview is a moving portrait of parental grief: ‘I have sad thoughts every day. I try not to be overcome by them’. More than 500,000 people read the piece on the day it was published and many people wrote in sharing their own stories. Another of Alex’s profiles that struck a chord with our readers in a huge way was his recent interview with Sir Patrick Stewart. The actor was refreshingly open in regard to the domestic violence he had witnessed at the hands of his father (“On stage, I could escape”), the impact that it had on him throughout his life - and why therapy had saved him. Alex dug deep with Sir Patrick, unpicking his relationship with his own children, “I love my children. But our relationships… They haven’t worked out.”