He’s one of the greatest living actors today, but Al Pacino is still learning, and more specifically, he’s learning from the younger generation of actors.
In a joint GQ interview alongside his life-long friend and collaborator Robert De Niro, Pacino waxes on the vastly different expectations for young actors today compared to when he was coming up—and he is impressed by them.
“The truth is some of these people that do do [a lot of promotion for their work], the young people, are very good at it. They’re wonderful actors too,” Pacino says. “And they know how to because they grew up with it. It’s not the same kind of stigma as it used to be when we were younger. It’s changed. Some very prominent young star told me that too. He just said to me straight out, ‘I know how to do this because it just came out of my upbringing.’ And he says, ‘I know you didn’t. You didn’t have that.’ And I thought, Gee, he’s making a good point here.”
However, Pacino explains why he’s been reluctant to do much press over the years, and warns that too much exposure can ultimately detract from your performance—or worse, can contribute to an audience’s incapability to see you as anything other than yourself as the actor.
READ: How Al Pacino Got His Start
“It’s keeping the page blank or the canvas blank so it doesn’t affect the performance you’re giving or the character you’re playing. That was my idea of it,” he says. “And Marty Bregman was a big help to me, my manager at the time. ’Cause he would always say to me, you know, something would happen, and I would say, ‘Gee, should I go on TV?’ And he would just say simply, ‘Not you, no. You don’t want to do that’... I thought you don’t give that away, because that is part of what your performance art is.”
Elsewhere in the interview (which every actor of every experience level should read in full), Pacino recalls the period in the mid-80s when he actually quit acting temporarily. Thankfully, it didn’t stick—but he doesn’t lie: He liked it.
“A bit of the bloom was off the rose for me, artistically and expressively. But somewhere in the back of my head, I always felt I could work. I always felt I’d be able to get work. And then the truth is I needed to go work. I had to earn,” he says. “I remember how wonderful it felt to even sort of contemplate anonymity…You know what they say: out of sight, out of mind. Because there was an intense period. It was, I would say, more of a happier period in my life than I remember. That doesn’t mean I’m gonna do it again.”
Well, we can all breathe a sigh of relief on that front.
Inspired? Check out Backstage’s film audition listings!