Al Pacino Recalls ‘Crazy’ Interaction With Fan—’I Retreated’

Al Pacino has revealed he “retreated” when a woman recognized him in public after the release of The Godfather, as he struggled with the concept of fame.

The actor appeared on an episode of Conan O’Brien’s podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend to promote his new autobiography, Sonny Boy. During their conversation, Pacino said he grappled with the fame that his portrayal of Michael Corleone in the 1972 film brought him.

Pacino’s breakthrough role was in The Godfather Trilogy, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. For his acting, Pacino was nominated for two Academy Awards, two Golden Globes and two BAFTAs.

The 84-year-old explained that when the first film was released, fame wasn’t something that serious actors pursued because it was “somewhat frowned upon.” Pacino said that there was a fear that if actors went to Hollywood, they would lose their talent.

He was also “extremely embarrassed” and he didn’t want to be noticed by anyone in public. However, The Godfather brought him a level of attention he wasn’t prepared for and he realized that everything had changed one day when he interacted with a fan at a traffic light.

Newsweek emailed a spokesperson for Pacino for comment on Friday outside of normal business hours.

“One time I’m at a light actually, I’m at a traffic light and I’m standing there to cross the street. And this kind of, gorgeous, you know, redhead—I’m sorry, it wasn’t you Conan, it was another redhead,” Pacino joked, referring to O’Brien.

“I’m a man, excuse me!” O’Brien quipped as the studio laughed. “I’m about as man as it gets.”

Pacino continued: “She didn’t look like you, I’ll just be straight with you … So she says hello to me, she says, ‘Hi.’ I thought, ‘Wow.’ I say ‘Wow, hi,’ she says: ‘Hi Michael.’

“And it was as though—I said, ‘This is crazy, she’s calling me Michael because she knows me. She knows me from the film.’ And I just retreated. I just, I couldn’t understand it, nobody did that to me my entire life. Nobody responded, ‘Hello Al,’ you know, they never said that. They said, ‘Get away,’ you know.

“So I was kinda, I was kind of shocked and I retreated and then I started seeing it happen in these various pockets with various people.”

The actor explained that people started treating him differently. One woman kissed his hand, and others would come up to him in public, which, he agreed, “freaked” him out.

Elsewhere in the podcast episode, the star revealed that there was initial resistance to him playing the role from Paramount Studios, leading to Coppola inviting him to a restaurant to tell him he wasn’t “cutting it.”

“[Coppola] tells me ‘You know, I had faith in you,’ and I said ‘Yeah I know,'” said Pacino. “He says, ‘Well you’re not cutting it’ and I thought, ‘Oh what do I do now? What do I say now?’ I said ‘Well, I guess that would be a problem so tell me what you mean.'”

Pacino then details that Coppola showed him the rushes, which is film footage that had already been shot, at the Paramount Theatre.

“I went and saw the rushes and I’m seeing the tapes of different things and I’m thinking, ‘Well that is not spectacular but why should it be?’ You see I was hoping that I could blend in with the scenery and not be seen specifically. I just wanted to blend and be natural,” Pacino told the podcast.

“So of course I said to Francis—naturally the actor’s instinct—’Yeah, I see what you mean.’ That always quiets everybody down.”

From that moment on, Pacino says he thought he was “out” of the film, but he managed to redeem himself with the rushes of the iconic restaurant scene in which Michael Corleone shoots Virgil Sollozzo and Captain Mark McCluskey, despite twisting his ankle in the process of filming it.