When Al Pacino gave the performance of a lifetime to a dog: “I’d never done that”
There are a thousand different ways for an actor to plumb the emotional depths and give the best possible performance, and Al Pacino is familiar with more than a few of them.
His recent filmography may indicate otherwise, but there genuinely was a time when he was renowned for understatement. With his soulful eyes, pensive gaze, and ability to say more with a gesture than a line of dialogue, Pacino utilised his hangdog face and body language to immerse himself into character.
When he discovered that shouting at the top of his lungs was equally effective, that was also a direction he was happy to embrace. The obvious downside is that dialling things up past 11 often tends to skirt the borders of self-parody, even if Pacino at his most exaggerated and “hoo-ah” is never anything less than entertainingly watchable.
Acting for the stage and the screen are two completely different disciplines, although Pacino has proven himself to be equally adept at both, which should be the bare minimum for a star who’s comfortably taken their place among the pantheon of all-time greats. However, narrowing his focus led to unexpected results, with an unwitting canine the recipient of his unbridled thespianism.
The Academy Award winner regaled The New York Times with his misguided attempt at adding a new string to his performative bow after he’d caught wind of his peers discussing how effective it can be for a stage actor to find one pair of eyes in the audience and perform directly to those peepers and those peepers only.
This was the year after he’d shot his star-making turn as Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, but before the film had released, so Pacino was still in sponge mode, where he’d soak up as much advice and inspiration as he possibly could, which in this case led to a strange performance of Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel.
“One night during a performance, I found myself relating to a pair of eyes in the audience, which was something unusual for me,” he explained. “I’d heard other actors talk about it, but I’d never done that. And I found I was gearing my performance to that section of the audience. By the time the curtain call came, I had to see; I had to find out who it was. And sitting there, of course, was a seeing-eye dog.”
The dog had absolutely no idea it was the biggest beneficiary of an acting masterclass from a rising star who’d soon emerge as one of the brightest talents in the business, even if Pacino might have kept the revelation to himself when confessing that he’d performed exclusively for a four-legged audience member would have made him the subject of widespread mockery from the rest of the cast and crew.
