The actors who owe their careers to Al Pacino, according to Al Pacino: “That role was mine for the taking”
Al Pacino doesn’t have a lot to regret in his career, but he has helped launch the careers of some of the most iconic actors in Hollywood through sheer bad judgment. To put it kindly, he has turned down some pretty successful scripts, either because he couldn’t see their potential or couldn’t be bothered to make them.
In fact, if Pacino had gotten his way, he would never have played his most iconic role. He has admitted that he had no interest in playing Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy, resenting the idea of doing a screen test and not wanting to travel to California. Thanks to some coaxing from Coppola and bullying from his manager, however, he got on the plane to Hollywood, and the rest, as they say, is history.
He’s clearly made some good career decisions in his life. You don’t just wander into nine Oscar nominations by chance. However, he himself has admitted that his legacy and the history of cinema would be profoundly different if he’d recognised the potential of more than one script that came his way.
Speaking to broadcaster Emma Freud in 2013, the actor acknowledged that he had turned down one of the most iconic action roles in cinema history – John McClane in Die Hard. In doing so, he helped pave the way for Bruce Willis, an actor who, at that point, was known primarily for his role as a detective in the television series Moonlighting. “I gave that boy a career,” Pacino quipped (via The Daily Record).
It’s more accurate to say that every A-list male star in Hollywood gave Willis a career because everyone from Clint Eastwood to Richard Gere turned the part down. Even Burt Reynolds wasn’t interested. The lack of a male star threatened to ruin the film, but thanks to Wills’ knockout performance and innate charisma, it became an all-time classic.
Another role Pacino turned down was even bigger. “You know who else I gave a career to?” He asked. “Harrison Ford in Star Wars. That role was mine for the taking, but I couldn’t understand the script.”
In all fairness to Pacino, George Lucas’ idea wasn’t an obvious home run. Samurais in space was an untested concept, to say the least, and for an actor known for playing a menacing yet tortured crime boss in one of the most prestigious trilogies in cinema history, transforming into the quippy captain of the Millennium Falcon probably didn’t feel particularly natural.
As if John McClane and Han Solo weren’t enough, Pacino turned down yet another famous role that helped turn an actor into an even bigger star – Edward Lewis in Pretty Woman. Although it’s hard to imagine anyone other than the devastatingly suave Richard Gere in the role, at one point, the producers thought Pacino was the man for the job.
You could spend hours grilling Pacino over his lack of judgment, but the more pertinent piece of information to glean from all these might-have-been performances is how respected he was in the industry. If you’re being offered roles in action movies, space operas, and romantic comedies, you’re doing something right. Although Pacino is mostly known for crime dramas, he clearly had the potential to play any role he wanted.
