NEW YORK, Feb 20 (Reuters) - After a six-decade-long

career, "Taxi Driver" actor Robert De Niro is starring in his

first television series - but he is not convinced he would do it

again.

"I don't know. It's a lot of work. It's like doing three

features back to back," said the veteran American actor.

De Niro portrays a former U.S. president in Netflix's ( NFLX )

limited series "Zero Day," which explores themes of

truth and disinformation.

De Niro's character leads the Zero Day Commission in the

wake of a cyberattack that has inflicted chaos and claimed

thousands of lives in the United States.

Matthew Modine, who plays a politician, said the show's plot

reflected how trust was being lost in institutions.

"It's not the question of if a cyberattack will happen on

the United States or in some other country around the world.

It's when," he said.

Preparation for the role was intense, according to De Niro.

"It was a lot of work to learn all that and a lot of it was

exposition, especially in certain parts," he said. "There wasn't

much room for paraphrasing and stuff like that, or adlibbing...

But it was worth doing, you know?"

The show was filmed during the last U.S. presidential

election campaign and creators Noah Oppenheim and Eric Newman

said they were surprised how much art seemed to imitate life.

"Every day we'd be on set, and whether it was

election-related news or just some other event in the world, we

would see things happening that when we had written about them

in the show, we had thought were fictional, you know, fancies

and pieces of speculation," said Oppenheim.

"And then we watched as these things unfolded in the real

world."

"Zero Day", which among others also stars Angela Bassett and

Jesse Plemons, begins streaming on Netflix ( NFLX ) on Thursday.