“That holy feeling”: Al Pacino on looking for Shakespeare

In his new memoir, Sonny Boy, Al Pacino describes how Shakespeare was central to his early development as a young actor. “I would bellow out monologues as I rambled through the streets of Manhattan,” Pacino writes. “If the hour was late and you heard someone in your alleyway with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night, that was probably me, training myself on the famous Shakespeare soliloquies.” Pacino’s dedication to the words of Shakespeare is both intensely passionate and sincere, yet the reverence with which he speaks of him (“Shakespeare belongs […] in the realm of Michelangelo”) is almost impossibly exalted and idealized.

Pacino “always felt at home on a stage,” and an early performance in a school play literally brought his divorced parents “back together again,” if only for a post-show ice cream. You can feel how much the art form means to him, and though he doesn’t pinpoint the moment he discovers Shakespeare, he envisions a future for himself doing “repertory theater” and dreaming romantically of the work he would do. “These were plays that would change my life,” Pacino writes. “Playwrights were prophets. They made me a better actor, gave me an education, offered me a deeper understanding of the world, and filled me with joy.”

After stage triumphs in The Indian Wants the Bronx and Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?, Pacino became globally acclaimed for his intense and contained performance as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, and the first thing he did in the wake of that film’s extraordinary success was return to the stage. Pacino accepted an invitation to play Richard III in Boston, a part he describes as “one of those classic roles that has made the reputation of actors from Edmund Kean to John Barrymore to Laurence Olivier. It would be the first Shakespeare play I did in front of a real audience and the continuation of my journey in learning about the character.” Pacino never reveals where that journey began, and though he describes the rehearsal period as “very interesting […], full of experiments and improvisations,” he confesses that “unfortunately, the three weeks of rehearsal were not enough, and I was still trying to figure out where I was going with my performance.” Pacino’s an instinctive actor who gives the impression of always waiting for lightning to strike, as it did in one of his early performances in Strindberg’s Creditors, when he remembers that “one night, onstage, just like that, it happened. The power of expression was revealed to me, in a way it never had before” — and, sadly, in a way he’s unwilling or unable to explain.

This image of Pacino fumbling around searching for how to interpret a character is documented fully in his 1996 film Looking for Richard. Years in the making, this passion project that Pacino financed and directed himself allows the actor an opportunity to fulfill a lifelong ambition to, as he explains in his opening voiceover, “communicate how I feel about Shakespeare to other people.” Tellingly, he doesn’t want to communicate what he thinks about Shakespeare or how his plays should best be interpreted; Looking for Richard is mostly about how “complicated” and inaccessible Shakespeare is, and how he can only be conquered by a knight errant leading a band of like-minded acolytes. Though they make a pun about it in the film — “That is the question…the quest!” — it’s clear that Pacino approaches Shakespeare as a holy mission.

Despite a few welcome moments of power and insight, Looking for Richard mostly reveals Pacino’s refusal to make decisions about the character and the story he’s supposed to be telling. Pacino explains his “process” on-camera: “We should get actors in here, let them just sit around, we’ll have different people read different roles, and hopefully, somehow, the role and the actor will merge.” This is, frankly, madness (without method in’t), but Pacino loves the chaos and the confusion, even when, in a moment of entirely self-inflicted frustration, he explodes, “We have an entire company on the stage, good actors, not knowing where they’re going, where they are!” In fairness, Pacino didn’t call his movie Finding Richard, and at least he’s able to joke about the limits of his approach when he says, “It’s going to take us four weeks rehearsal just to figure out what parts we’re playing!”

Pacino understands the character of Richard III better than he’s able to articulate perhaps because he shares Richard’s ability to, as he says in the film, “[stir] the pot and use “the fear and general turmoil to his advantage.” In his New York Times review of the 1973 production, Mel Gussow writes, “This is a playful Richard, emphasizing the humor along with the malice. Pacino woos Lady Anne not with charm but with intellectual persistence. He vanquishes antagonists with language. [He’s] an actor relishing his own extraordinary performance.” It’s not clear whether Gussow is talking about Richard or Pacino.

The other Shakespeare role Pacino has played multiple times onstage is Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, which he got to play onscreen in Michael Radford’s 2004 film. Pacino is able to describe more clearly what appeals to him about this character: he explains in Sonny Boy that he’s drawn to Shylock’s “dignity,” saying “He’s not an Iago, not a Richard III, or any of the other villains of Shakespeare.” He sees Shylock as a “hero […] a survivor.” Despite Pacino’s different conceptions of the characters, onscreen they sound exactly alike. Both speak in the familiar Pacino-esque cadence that alternates between slow and quiet phrasing and sudden fast and loud outbursts.

Pacino’s legacy as Michael Corleone also makes it hard to miss the similarities between the third scene of Merchant with the opening scene of The Godfather. Pacino’s Shylock channels Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone when both are asked for favors by reluctant men who would rather not be indebted to a Jewish moneylender or an Italian gangster. Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning screenplay even echoes Shakespeare’s rhetorical structure:

from The Godfather:
DON CORLEONE: You were afraid to be in my debt […] You had a good trade, made a good living. The police protected you and there were courts of law. And you didn’t need a friend of me. But, uh, now you come to me and you say, “Don Corleone, give me justice.” But you don’t ask with respect. You don’t offer friendship. You don’t even think to call me Godfather.

from The Merchant of Venice:
SHYLOCK: You call me misbeliever, cutthroat dog,
And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well then, it now appears you need my help.
Go to, then. You come to me and you say
“Shylock, we would have moneys”—you say so,
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard,
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold.

Pacino revered Brando and in Sonny Boy expresses the latter’s impact in Shakespearean terms, comparing him to the young James Dean. “Dean was like a sonnet, compact and economical, able to do so much with the merest gesture or nuance,” Pacino writes. “And if Dean was a sonnet, then Brando was an epic poem.” It’s quite moving to see Pacino embrace the stillness and power of his inspiration (and onscreen father) while playing Shylock.

Pacino returned to Merchant again in productions for New York’s Shakespeare in the Park and on Broadway, both directed by Daniel Sullivan, and was grateful for the opportunity to play the role with a kind of unrehearsed spontaneity that would nightly change the way he’d deliver his lines. It would be “almost like improvisation,” Pacino writes in Sonny Boy, “only with the great words of Shakespeare.” This may be a useful approach in rehearsal, but it’s deadly in performance: an actor chasing moment-to-moment epiphanies risks losing the overall pace and sense of the character, while sacrificing the story the actors should be serving. Indeed, Pacino confesses his experiment “failed,” but that the “challenge” and “striving” to reach those performing heights night after night is why Pacino says, “I love the theater.”

“I had no education and no desire to have more,” Pacino declares. “I was interested in one thing. I believed I was an artist.” That bohemian distinction — artists can’t be educated? — is one of several revelations in Sonny Boy, which is winningly frank about Pacino’s “avant-garde” excesses and lack of a “social gene” (which he assures us is now “finally developed”). But anyone looking for specifics on how this powerful actor is able to make Shakespeare’s language come to such glorious life will come away disappointed. Pacino says he has plans to film King Lear and I hope he does. Since he can’t explain how he’s able to so brilliantly inhabit Shakespeare’s words, I’ll take any opportunity to watch him speaking the speeches young “Sonny Boy” Pacino practiced in the streets of New York City over 50 years ago.