“It was a personal journey”: the role that left Al Pacino feeling “the most disturbed”
One of the most famous method actors in Hollywood, Al Pacino has spent his career using those immersive techniques to his advantage, building up a remarkable body of work featuring a number of powerhouse performances that left no stone unturned in their pursuit of greatness.
Emerging in the 1970s when the ‘New Hollywood’ movement was in full swing, and the age of chiselled, telegenic stars was in danger of being subsumed by a raft of free-spirited radicals who sought to upend convention at every turn, he was the perfect actor for a transformative era.
Alongside peers like Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, and Gene Hackman, Pacino and his ilk redefined what a movie star could be, gaining equal amounts of respect, recognition, and drawing power. There’s a strong case to be made for him having the strongest decade out of them all, though, which is saying something.
The ’70s gave rise to a number of seminal pictures, but it felt like Pacino was in a league of his own. He anchored The Godfather, Serpico, The Godfather Part II, and Dog Day Afternoon within the space of three years, and every single one of them is a turn pulled right out of the top drawer.
While he went to great lengths to embody the characters within, none of them made much of a psychological imprint once cameras stopped rolling and it was time to move on to a new project. The same can’t be said of a 1977 romantic drama directed by Sydney Pollack, however, which made an impact on Pacino, unlike any other role he’d ever played.
“I felt the most disturbed when I played that race-car driver in Bobby Deerfield,” he admitted to Playboy. “It was a personal journey into someone who was isolated and depressed. And it was the first time I was sober. I’m not terribly fond of that performance, but I felt close to it at the time because I was moving away from a world I had known; I had a lot of successes in a row, I felt like a I had been shot out of a cannon and I was a little isolated.”
He may not have been too thrilled with his own performance, but Pacino still earned a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actor’ after embodying the title character, an American racing driver who finds huge success in Formula One thanks to a combination of self-confidence, arrogance, and borderline recklessness.
When he witnesses a tragic accident that kills a teammate, it upends his worldview completely and finds him haunted everywhere he goes by the looming shadow of death. Even with the combination of Pacino and Pollack, Bobby Deerfield underwhelmed on the critical and commercial fronts, which must have made it even harder for the leading man to shake off the lingering after-effects of a protagonist who’d left him so deeply disturbed.
