The one role Al Pacino always wanted to play: “It would have been nice to be asked”
Most actors have a dream role they’d give anything to play, and securing that part tends to become a lot easier once the performer in question has conquered their chosen field. However, it’s far from a given, as Al Pacino discovered when he went through his legendary career rueing the one that always got away.
By the end of the 1970s, Pacino had already surpassed being a generational talent. He spent the decade delivering performances of the highest quality, several of which will always be remembered among the finest in American cinema, so he was already part of the all-timer conversation by the end of his 30s.
He earned four consecutive Academy Award nominations for The Godfather, Serpico, The Godfather Part II, and Dog Day Afternoon, and he was equally effective in the likes of Scarecrow, …And Justice for All, and Bobby Deerfield, the latter of which features Pacino’s personal favourite from his back catalogue.
All of this happened within ten years of his screen debut in 1969’s Me, Natalie, too, which was a remarkably rapid rise from obscurity to ubiquity. He had his pick of the roles and was able to dictate the direction of his career, except for that one character he desperately wanted to embody that nobody seemed interested in offering his way.
He might have been a student of the method and absorbed as much from Marlon Brando as he possibly could, but Pacino was always a classicist at heart. A devotee of William Shakespeare, the actor and ‘The Bard’ crossed paths constantly on stage and screen in an association that spanned decades.
He’d performed Richard III and Julius Caesar in New York theatre and played Shylock in both stage and movie versions of The Merchant of Venice, in addition to making his directorial debut in the docudrama Looking for Richard, which explored not only Pacino’s ongoing fascination with Shakespeare but the way the playwright continued to influence popular culture centuries after his death.
The Oscar winner knows ‘The Bard’ like the back of his hand, then, which still wasn’t enough. In an interview with the Calgary Sun, the legend confessed that there was one massive regret he’d constantly harboured since he first started working as a professional actor.
“No one ever asked me to play Hamlet,” he lamented. “I don’t think I’m right for the part, but it would have been nice to be asked.” Maybe he’s correct in believing that he was the wrong person to play the character, but it nonetheless stung that no stage director or filmmaker in the entire industry was willing to give him a shot.
Some of the greatest actors in history have played Hamlet – Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, and Christopher Plummer among them – and Mel Gibson even showed that high-profile productions didn’t need to stick to British actors. Sadly, Pacino never got his shot.
