The one role Al Pacino said he was “born to play”
Despite delivering several of the most memorable performances in the history of American cinema, almost everyone would surely agree that The Godfather‘s Michael Corleone is the role that Al Pacino was born to play. Everyone, that is, except Al Pacino.
As the centrepiece of Francis Ford Coppola’s trilogy, Pacino’s second-generation crime boss effortlessly stepped out of the chasm left behind by Marlon Brando’s iconic Vito, with his slow-burning evolution across the seminal first two instalments a masterclass in how to bring a character to life.
Even in the much-maligned third entry, which has plenty of problems, none of them are Pacino’s fault. His arc as the ageing head of a criminal empire, desperate for redemption and rehabilitation and troubled by guilt, greed, and the sins of the father, is worthy of sitting next to the first and second films, even if The Godfather III isn’t as a whole.
That’s without even mentioning his emotionally affecting work in Scarecrow, his tour-de-force outings in Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico, or even Bobby Deerfield, which is nobody’s favourite Al Pacino movie, apart from Al Pacino. And yet, he didn’t say he was born to play any of them, but thank fuck he didn’t opt for Scent of Woman‘s ‘Hoo-ah!’ merchant Frank Slade, because that would be nuts.
Still, that doesn’t make his choice any less unlikely. “I was really born to play Big Boy,” he said at a 35th anniversary screening of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, per People. “I started out as a comic. That’s shocking, especially since I’m not funny.” To be fair, that’s not the only reason it’s shocking, since there can’t be many who’d rank it in Pacino’s all-time top ten, never mind the top five.
Buried under prosthetics and hamming it up for the cheap seats, he evidently had a whale of a time inhaling the scenery and spitting it back out onto the screen in the intentionally preposterous comic strip adaptation, and he still managed to dial himself way past 11 without coming across as a guy who was phoning it in, which is a lot harder than it sounds.
His over-the-top showcase earned him Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, and his approach to the material was perfect for the movie Beatty wanted to, and did, make, but “born to play” feels like a stretch. Then again, he’s Al Pacino, and he can say whatever the hell he wants about Al Pacino’s career with more authority than anyone else, so who’s going to argue?
He wasn’t just patting himself on the back, though: “It’s an amazing job they did,” he said. “All the actors did.” That said, even though Dick Tracy won three Oscars for its art direction, makeup, and Stephen Sondheim’s original song, ‘Sooner or Later (I Always Get my Man)’, Pacino was the only member of the ensemble recognised during awards season, so maybe he really was born to play Alphonse Caprice after all.
It’s not the most obvious, expected, or even common-sense answer, but if that’s how he feels, fair fucks.
