Even though Al Pacino is one of the most highly-regarded veteran actors still working today, the latter part of his career has seen him star in a lot of dreck. Some of the recent low points include duds like 88 Minutes and Righteous Kill, and it doesn’t get much worse than his stupid cameo in Adam Sandler’s atrocious Jack & Jill (seen above). However, the eight-time Oscar nominee and one-time Oscar winner actually has a reason for starring in bad movies: he’s trying to make them better.
In a recent joint-interview alongside Robert De Niro at GQ, while making the promotional rounds for The Irishman, Pacino admitted that he purposely stars in bad movies in order to see if he can elevate a project. The actor said:
“You know what? I may be falling into a bad habit now. I think I’m starting to get a little perverse. I’m starting to want to do films that aren’t really very good and try to make them better. And that’s become my challenge. I don’t think I go in thinking it’s not gonna be very good, but it’s like Bob said: Sometimes they offer you money to do something that’s not adequate. And you talk yourself into it. And somewhere within you, you know that this thing is gonna be a lemon. But then, when it comes full circle, and you see it, you say, ‘Oh, no. I’m gonna make this better.’ And you spend a lot of time and you’re doing all these things, and you say, ‘If I can just get this to be a mediocre film,’ and you get excited by that.”
Not many actors have the stature and confidence to say something like this. And it’s nice that he also admits that the paycheck plays a part in him taking on bad movies. But he also has a point. Who knows how much worse certain movies would have been if Al Pacino wasn’t involved? The next time you see one of those bad Al Pacino movies, you think about that.
At the very least, Pacino hasn’t gone the route of actors like Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis where they seem to take every single role offered to them and clearly phone it in more often than not. Here’s hoping that his role in The Irishman will have him being a little more picky about the movies he tackles from here on out. Pacino even admits:
“It’s an impulse that I’ve got to just put that away now. ‘Every time I get the urge to exercise, I lie down till it passes.’ That’s Oscar Wilde, I think. But the point is that it’s true. I work onstage a lot when I’m not doing other things.”
We’ll see Al Pacino next in Jordan Peele’s Nazi-hunting series Hunters on Amazon. Otherwise, The Irishman is playing in select theaters now and arrives on Netflix on November 27, 2019.
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