When Al Pacino kicked Helen Mirren off the set of a movie she wasn’t even in: “He didn’t want me there”
Dame Helen Mirren has worked alongside some of the best actors to ever do it. Anthony Hopkins in Hitchcock, Malcolm McDowell in Caligula, Nigel Hawthorne in The Madness of King George, and just about everyone who was anyone in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. And that’s just in her movie career. On TV, she played Harrison Ford’s on-screen wife in Yellowstone prequel 1923, and on stage, she has strutted the boards with generations of esteemed acting talent.
Sharing space with so many big names has given the English star a vast array of fascinating life experiences, though not all of them have been entirely straightforward. In conversation with The Sydney Morning Herald, Mirren explained a bizarre incident she once had on the set of a movie she wasn’t even in, one involving a run-in with fellow acting legend, Al Pacino.
Mirren has been married to American director Taylor Hackford since 1997. Alongside the likes of Ray and An Officer and a Gentleman, Hackford also made The Devil’s Advocate, a supernatural horror movie starring, among others, Mr. Pacino. Mirren came to visit Hackford on set one day, under the proviso that she keep a low profile and not draw too much attention to herself.
“But Al spotted me behind hundreds of people and then I saw him talk to my husband,” Mirren revealed. “Taylor then came over and said, ‘I’m sorry, Helen, I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave the set.’ It’s a weird actor’s thing where you don’t like being looked at by your peers, so he didn’t want me there!” And that was that. Mirren had to go home, not even allowed to visit her own husband whilst he was at work.
Actors are an extremely sensitive breed, especially when they reach the level of success (and ego) of Al Pacino. Considering how acclaimed a performer Mirren is, it’s easy to see why even the great Tony Montana would get shy about working in front of her. With a direct line to his boss too, Mirren held a lot of power over Pacino, so he clearly thought it was safer to get rid of her before she affected his confidence too badly.
Despite both being top level names in the world of acting, Mirren and Pacino didn’t get the chance to work together until 2013’s Phil Spector, a biopic of the controversial music producer. Pacino played Spector, who spent the last years of his life in prison for the murder of actor Lana Clarkson, whilst Mirren played Linda Kenney Baden, his defense attorney. Most people would have forgotten something as minor as the Devil’s Advocate incident, but not Mirren, who took the opportunity to remind her new colleague of his former slight – “’I told him, ‘Al, this is one set you can’t throw me off!'”
Hackford has also seemingly buried the hatchet with Pacino, as he’s cast him in his upcoming film, Sniff. Set in a retirement home, this neo-noir outing will reportedly see Martin Freeman and Danny DeVito team up as a pair of detectives investigating a series of murders amongst the community’s elite. Pacino is set to play Harvey Stride, a big name on campus with a dark secret. One of his associates is a female enforcer nicknamed ‘The Spider’, who just so happens to be played by his old friend Helen Mirren. Good luck trying to get rid of her this time, Al.
