Al Pacino has a new memoir out, Sonny Boy, exploring his legendary acting career. We haven’t picked our copy up yet, but we have been experiencing the book through the usual round of excerpts, and it’s given us a question: Does Al Pacino understand how ludicrously famous he is?
This, per a Variety excerpt from what we assume is fairly late in the book, as Pacino talks about a good run of films he had starting with Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood in 2019 “I got lucky,” Pacino writes, describing how he suddenly became “way more famous now than I ever was… I was in three films in a row that in different ways made a real impact, starting with Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. I didn’t get paid the big bucks for it, but I was working with Quentin Tarantino, Leo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie, and I did like the part. That’s why I did it, but I said to my lawyer, ‘How do I do this without being paid?’” After discussing how his scene with DiCaprio was originally 21 pages long, before Tarantino cut it down in the movie—”I’m not faulting him for it. He had a reason to do it”—Pacino praises the movie as “A great film. And the mere fact that I was in it gave me some sort of cachet.”
Which we will say, as people who were covering pop culture news at the time, was not the vibe out here in Regular People Land when his casting announced. Which was far closer to “Oh shit, Tarantino actually got Pacino!” It strikes us that Pacino’s self-perception might be pretty far off from his general rep as one of America’s most well-known and talented actors, especially when he sounds a tad shocked that Martin Scorsese then set him up in a meaty role in The Irishman that same year. “I get a nomination for an Oscar,” he writes, “Putting me up against Brad Pitt, Joe Pesci, Anthony Hopkins and Tom Hanks. I had no problem that night accepting my loser status among those guys.” Buddy, c’mon!
Now, to be fair to Al Pacino’s low self-esteem, the 2000s and 2010s were admittedly not his greatest years. (He openly admits to taking a lot of roles strictly for a paycheck; because we’re working from excerpts, we don’t know if he directly addresses the Dunkaccino, but it has to loom large in his memories of the era.) But even so, he was still Al Pacino, popping up every now and again, usually for HBO, to remind us that he could take command of a room and refuse to let it go. But, hey, we all have views of ourselves; the upshot is that Pacino is pretty delighted with life at the moment, having re-embraced roles where “I related to the part and felt I could bring something.”
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