The price of fame almost cost Al Pacino dearly: “I didn’t know what was happening”
Before The Godfather changed the world of cinema forever in 1972, Al Pacino was a struggling New York theatre actor whom few movie fans could have picked out of a lineup.
After Francis Ford Coppola’s Mafia epic was released, though, every changed for Pacino overnight. Suddenly, he was Michael Corleone, the heir to his father’s throne as the head of the Corleone family, and a seemingly good man who audiences watched become corrupted by the organised crime world he’d been born into. Michael tried to escape that world by becoming a war hero, but he wound up right back where he was always destined to be anyway.
Pacino’s journey, in some ways, resembled Michael’s in the film. The last thing he wanted was to be famous, just as the last thing Michael wanted was to be a gangster, and yet playing the iconic character instantly made his face one of the most recognisable in the world. Prior to this, when he was acting in plays like The Indian Wants the Bronx and Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie, Pacino claimed that he was still able to wander the streets of New York unnoticed. So unnoticed, in fact, that if he said hello to a pretty woman, they’d more than likely ignore him completely.
After The Godfather, though, he recalled standing on a corner one day when a beautiful woman ambled past. “I looked at her and said, ‘Hi,’ and she looked at me and said, ‘Hi, Michael,’” Pacino told The Hollywood Reporter with barely restrained disbelief. “Well, you could have knocked me over. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, it’s over,’ meaning, ‘I’m not anonymous anymore. There’s no going back.’”
Losing one’s anonymity is obviously fucking funny, and different people react to it in different ways. There are countless actors out there who would kill to have played Michael Corleone and think they would have embraced the fame it bestowed upon them with gusto. Pacino, though, was a private, quiet guy who just loved the theatre, not necessarily the idea of being a movie star.
The notion that people now knew who he was, that Hollywood would expect him to attend glitzy awards ceremonies, and that he’d never again be able to walk the streets of his home city without people going, “Hey, it’s Al Pacino!” did a real number on his head. “I was sort of blasted out of a cannon,” Pacino admitted about that rocketship to fame and fortune he took after The Godfather. “I didn’t know what was happening to me.”
Unfortunately, instead of finding a healthy way to cope with the excitement, stress, and the goddamn relentless nature of fame, Pacino did what most people do when something shakes their lives to the core: he self-medicated. “I was drinking and having fun and not having fun and dying and going crazy — I was doing all of those things — but I kept going,” he confessed with a shrug. “I didn’t know where I was.”
Worryingly, Pacino claimed he drank and partied so much during this period that he doesn’t remember much of the 1970s. In fact, he can only really chart his decade through the four Oscar nominations he notched thanks to The Godfather, Serpico, The Godfather Part II, and Dog Day Afternoon. “I know how explosive it was, but I was inebriated most of the time,” he acknowledged. “I was trying to numb-up to get through it.”
Ultimately, numbing his pain with substances wasn’t ever going to be a sustainable solution for Pacino, and over time, he managed to acclimatise to his new world. He did have some helpful advice from a titan of the acting craft, though: Lee Strasberg, often seen as the pioneer of method acting in the US. Pacino revealed Strasberg “was a dear friend and a mentor”, and when he saw how much soul-crushing angst the young star had about his newfound fame, he simply quipped, “Darling, you simply have to adjust.”
