Robert De Niro is expressing his love for his daughter Airyn, who recently came out as transgender.
“As long as they’re not hurting themselves, doing anything that’s destructive or anything like that, you have to support them. Period,” the Oscar winner, 81, said in an interview with Entertainment Tonight on Wednesday, June 4.
Airyn, 29, came out as a trans woman in an interview with Them published in April, prompting De Niro to issue a statement supporting his daughter. (The actor shares Airyn and her twin brother, Julian, with ex Toukie Smith.)
“I loved and supported Aaron as my son, and now I love and support Airyn as my daughter. I don’t know what the big deal is. I love all my children,” De Niro said at the time.
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In her interview with Them, Airyn thanked her parents for allowing her to grow up outside of the spotlight.
“Obviously no parent is perfect, but I am grateful that both my parents agreed to keep me out of the limelight. They wanted it very private,” she said. “They have told me they wanted me to have as much of a normal childhood as possible.”
In the interview, Airyn touched on her upbringing and her interest in following in her parents’ footsteps by acting.
“I always grew up a bigger-bodied person,” she recalled. “Everybody else in the family [was] relatively thin or fit; I was not, so I sort of stood out like a sore thumb and there wasn’t anybody in my family that could relate to that experience.”
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With her newfound platform and potential Hollywood credits, Airyn hopes to be a role model for other people in the LGBTQIA+ community.
“I want queer people of color and bigger-bodied people to have an Alex Consani. I want queer people of color and bigger-bodied people to have a Hunter Schafer,” she said. “A part of me has always wanted to model and sort of follow my mom’s footsteps. Honestly, if I could be on the cover of Vogue with her or recreating one of her pictures, that would be a dream come true.”
As well as Julian and Airyn, De Niro is the father of five other children. He shares daughter Drena, 57, and son Raphael, 48, with ex-wife Diahnne Abbott, son Elliot, 27, and daughter Helen, 13, with ex-wife Grace Hightower, and Gia, 2, with girlfriend Tiffany Chen.
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Last September, the actor got candid about raising seven children, saying he did his best.
“I’m trying my best,” De Niro said on CNN’s Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace? “I’m going to put on my gravestone, ‘I tried my best.’ I was thinking about that the other day. Please forgive me for everything that I’ve done that you could …”
When host Chris Wallace asked De Niro if he was not a good father, the Oscar winner replied, “I tried my best is all I would say.”
