Robert De Niro coming to Philly to film crime drama ‘After Exile’

Philadelphia will get a whole lot of Robert De Niro come November.

When Netflix’s The Irishman, in which De Niro plays Philly area mobster Frank Sheeran, premieres, he’ll actually be in Philly to film another project.

De Niro will come to town for After Exile, which starts principal photography in Philly in early November, Greater Philadelphia Film Office executive director Sharon Pinkenson has confirmed. The film, another crime drama, puts De Niro alongside Shailene Woodley, and Chloë Grace Moretz. Joshua Michael Stern (Jobs) will direct.

Announced earlier this year, the film features De Niro as an ex-con Deadline reports. Variety previously reported that Shia LaBeouf would appear in the film as De Niro’s son, but Pinkenson said LaBeouf is not involved in the project.

De Niro has played a few Philly area-based characters over the years, most recently Sheeran, a reputed mobster from Darby who claimed to have killed Jimmy Hoffa — a story on which The Irishman will focus when it is released in theaters on Nov. 1 and on Netflix Nov. 27. One of De Niro’s most well known Philly characters is a tad softer than the mob-associated assassin: Pat Solitano Sr., otherwise known as the father of Bradley Cooper’s character in 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook, which filmed in the Philly ‘burbs.

As Philly area native Cooper told David Letterman on the Late Show back in 2012, he actually volunteered his own Uncle Ernie, a heating and air-conditioning repairman from Delco, to teach De Niro the Philly accent. According to NBC, Cooper’s uncle did so by reading De Niro his own lines from the script.

After Exile will be the latest in a string of high-profile projects to film in Philadelphia this year. So far, we’ve seen stars like Jason Segel working on Dispatches from Elsewhere, Idris Elba making Concrete Cowboys, the Fab Five doing makeovers for Netflix’s Queer Eye, and Sterling K. Brown and Lyric Ross filming NBC’s This Is Us.

“It’s exciting,” Pinkenson said of After Exile’s upcoming trip to Philly. “It’s been quite a year.”