Al Pacino turned down the lead role in ‘Pretty Woman’
Thanks to his work in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy, Sidney Lumet’s Serpico, Michael Mann’s Heat and Brian De Palma’s Scarface, Hollywood usually tends to pigeonhole the great Al Pacino as solely the mean-faced bully of crime movies. However, when you pay closer attention to his filmography, it is made immediately clear that this is not the case. Whilst Pacino might lean closer to the aggressive side of cinema, bringing authenticity to his characters due to a troublesome upbringing as a young man, his scope extends much further than the mean streets of the United States.
Pacino has lent his skills to a variety of different titles, ranging from the sports drama Any Given Sunday to the independent flick Manglehorn. In the latter, he plays a reclusive key-maker lamenting a lost love, and with it soundtracked by post-rock legends Explosions in the Sky, the feature could not be further away from the image of Al Pacino’s stern crime dramas.
Despite Pacino’s oeuvre dispelling the narrative that he only works on crime-based films, the 2019 revelation that he once nearly starred opposite Julia Roberts in the 1990 rom-com Pretty Woman still came as a genuine surprise. In what would have made for an entirely jarring viewing experience, it is borderline impossible to imagine anyone but Richard Gere in the role.
However, during a conversation with GQ alongside friend and The Godfather Part II co-star Robert De Niro, Pacino made the revelation. The actor said that although he was offered the role in Pretty Woman, and liked the script, he ultimately chose to turn it down. Interestingly, Pacino didn’t explain why. “I’ll tell you something, I’ll say it because I read, I read aloud Pretty Woman with the young Julia Roberts,” he said.
He then recalled that he immediately knew it would be a hit, adding: “And Gary Marshall got a group of us together, and I was actually filming something at the time and I went,” Pacino continued. “I mean, you could tell at the reading, this is going to be good, this is going to be a hit picture. You just knew it.”
Pacino then explained that he was greatly impressed by the talent of Julia Roberts, who wasn’t the star she now is, something attributed to her performance in Pretty Woman. “And this girl was phenomenal,” Pacino said. “I mean, I said to Gary, ‘Where did you get this girl?’ And so you really get a sense of it. And that was just to prove that instinct was correct.”
“I didn’t do the picture,” Pacino concluded. “Yeah, they offered it to me.”
