“His hands were full of red sauce”: when Marlon Brando met Al Pacino covered in chicken stew
Meeting one of their idols will always be a rite of passage for any young actor making their first tentative steps into the movie business. It’s nerve-racking and exciting but also eye-opening – after all, it’s likely to be the first time they realise their hero is now a contemporary, as strange as that might feel. When Al Pacino met Marlon Brando for the first time on the set of The Godfather, though, he had a truly surreal encounter that left him unsure of what to think. After all, the iconic star was covered in chicken stew at the time.
In his memoir Sonny Boy, Pacino was painfully honest about how he felt when director Francis Ford Coppola told him he wanted him to have lunch with Brando. The two stars had briefly crossed paths at a full-cast dinner, but Coppola wanted their characters to have a closer relationship on screen—a real father-son connection. For Pacino, though, the gravity of Brando’s star was simply too massive for him to comprehend a one-on-one meal.
“I actually didn’t want to talk to him,” wrote the Scarface star. “I thought it was not necessary.” In truth, he was scared at the prospect of eating with his hero, as he explained: “He was the greatest living actor of our time. I grew up on actors like him — larger-than-life people like Clark Gable and Cary Grant.” To the young star, people like Brando were famous when it meant something to be famous; they weren’t like today’s reality stars and influencers. Their fame still had an element of mystery, and he didn’t want to skewer that. Of course, it also sounds like he was experiencing serious imposter syndrome at the idea of being Brando’s peer.
Bizarrely, the lunch didn’t occur in a restaurant or at a catering truck near the set. Instead, Brando was sitting in a hospital bed, with Pacino in the bed beside him, because the production was shooting the scene in which Michael Corleone visits his stricken father, Don Vito, in a foreboding empty hospital.
Brando began asking his young co-star questions like, “Where are you from?” and “How long have you been an actor?” Pacino, though, could barely concentrate on answering because the entire time he talked, Brando was also eating chicken cacciatore with his bare hands. Pacino marvelled, “His hands were full of red sauce. So was his face. And that’s all I could think about the whole time.”
Pacino stared at this titan of cinema – a man often called the greatest actor of all time – and was utterly fixated by the incongruity of the situation. Brando was getting messier and messier by the second, and Pacino wondered, “What was he going to do with the chicken? I hoped he wasn’t going to tell me to throw it in the garbage for him.” In the end, the remnants were somehow spirited away from the bed without Brando getting up – and then the On the Waterfront star fixed Pacino with his gaze.
Pacino felt Brando was challenging him with his eyes – effectively asking, “What are you thinking about?” In his mind, though, all Pacino could think about was what Brando was planning to do with his sauce-covered hands. Did he need a napkin? Was that something Pacino should provide? Before he could leap into action, though, Brando did something which stunned the young star.
Pacino wrote: “He spread both his hands across the white hospital bed and smeared the sheets with red sauce, without even thinking about it, and he kept on talking.”
The Serpico star couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He had been raised to be polite, tidy, and respectful, and the idea of a guy smearing delicious Italian sauce all over his bedsheets rewired his brain. He thought, “Is that how movie stars act? You can do anything.” To Brando, though, this was all perfectly normal, and when lunch was finished, he simply looked at Pacino “with those gentle eyes of his and said, ‘Yeah, kid, you’re gonna be all right.'”
In retrospect, Pacino isn’t sure what he actually said to Brando after this. He figures he must have said “Thank you” at least, but now knows he should have asked the Apocalypse Now star, “Can you define ‘all right?'”
