The co-star Al Pacino only bullied in character: “A way for him to feel more free”
It’s rare to hear about a nervous Al Pacino. Basically, from the second he hit the screens, he was a star of it as his big break, The Godfather, came quickly as one of his first fundamental roles. But still, something shook him, and his default reaction was cruelty.
The way we act when we’re scared or nervous is a strange thing. It’s a subconscious thing, embedded in the deepest webs of ourselves and connected to how we were treated as kids or how we handled tense moments way back when.
Look, I’m not here to psychoanalyse Al Pacino, but perhaps somehow should have been nicer to a Baby Al, as it seems that when the star gets scared, his go-to is to lash out to some degree, or hide what he perceives as weakness by trying to be the tough guy.
On the set of Dick Tracy, that came out clearly.
For a man mostly associated with playing tough guys, casting Pacino into the world of musicals was an interesting move. In the role of Alphonse ‘Big Boy’ Caprice, he was still playing his usual gangster, but now with a nod to old Hollywood and some tapping toes.
The film itself isn’t a musical, but Pacino’s character is embedded in that world, dealing with cabaret dancers, including Breathless Mahoney, a dancer, played by none other than Madonna.
This is where things got interesting on set. There’s a meta scene where Madonna, as Breathless, is doing her dance while Pacino, as Big Boy, is yelling stage directions at her, tearing the performance apart and delivering some tough critique. Already it was a tough one as Madonna, alongside her favourite choreographer, Jeffrey Hornaday, had already planned the whole routine, so then she was essentially having to undo it to make it look like her character was figuring it out. That was a challenge enough.
But then, alongside her, Pacino had been granted permission to improvise his insults. “Musicals were a totally foreign world to him, so I think it was a way for him to feel more free and not become self-conscious,” Hornaday said of the situation, as if the director, Warren Beatty, was attempting to loosen Pacino up a bit.
He was in an odd situation. Madonna was absolutely no stranger to music, musical or tough criticism. Around the same time, she’d been working with the ultimate musical theatre icon, Stephen Sondheim, so she was used to harsh feedback.
However, Pacino likely gave her some flashbacks as during the takes for the scene, he was laying into her heavy, mocking her, tearing her performance apart and pushing her, exactly as a gangster director would do to his cabaret girl.
Really, he was just doing his job, but the intensity he did it definitely speaks to an anxious Pacino leaning into his macho, angry side as the unfamiliar world of song and dance around him left him feeling clearly a bit out of place.
