Al Pacino to star alongside Katie Holmes in new thriller
Most actors who’ve already secured legendary status tend to slow down as they approach the twilight years of their career, but if anything, Al Pacino has been keeping himself busier than ever.
Although his only release of 2023 was the Michael Keaton-directed crime thriller Knox Goes Away, the iconic star has at least half a dozen projects coming down the pipeline. Now, he’s added one more to his plate after signing on for another crime story that’s set to put a new spin on well-trodden ground.
In 1973, John Paul Getty III was kidnapped in Rome by a local crime syndicate and held for a $17million ransom. His grandfather, oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, was reluctant to pay up until a severed ear was sent to a newspaper, leading to the teenager eventually being freed after five months.
It’s been the subject of several features already – most notably Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World – but Pacino’s Captivated is taking a different approach. Toby Kebbell will play kidnapper Saro Mammoliti in the 1970s-set sequences, with The Godfather icon playing the present-day version of the character.
Katie Holmes is also on board as Getty’s mother Abigail Harris, with the ransom negotiations becoming complicated when Mammoliti falls in love with her. Per Deadline, one of the producers on Captivated is Michael Mammoliti, the nephew of kidnapper Saro, with the project having been in the works for years as he sought to paint his family in a different light.
According to his recollections, Mammoliti is convinced that his uncle eventually developed romantic feelings for Harris, which is set to differentiate this film on the Getty kidnapping from the several that have come before.
With Pacino playing an older version of Kebbell, it’s unlikely that he’ll be the focal point of the narrative, but his grizzled gravitas is always a welcome presence on-screen. As mentioned, it’s just one of many upcoming titles the Academy Award winner has in the works, which includes Johnny Depp’s second directorial effort Modì.
In addition, Pacino has Julian Schnabel’s fantastical drama In the Hand of Dante, Enrico Natale and David Midell’s horror The Ritual opposite Ben Foster, and True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto’s feature debut Easy’s Waltz on the cards, as well as playing the title character in Billy Knight and embodying Fidel Castro in Killing Castro, which details the Cuban leader’s first trip to New York City in the 1960s to speak to the United Nations.
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