Al Pacino’s ‘disastrous’ first film role left him depressed: ‘I don’t want to do this with my life’

Al Pacino is living proof that even the most iconic film stars can have rocky beginnings filled with self doubt.

In his new memoir Sonny Boy, Pacino recalled his first film role, in 1969’s Patty Duke comedy Me, Natalie, with a load of regrets. “Patty was the sweetest of people to me. But I was disastrous, and depressed by that whole thing,” he wrote.

The Oscar winner proceeds to elaborate in detail on why the Me, Natalie shooting experience was so lousy: “I got there early in the morning because I was told to be there early in the morning, earlier than anyone does anything in the morning. I had no one to talk to, and I sat around and I waited. And waited. And waited. And as I waited, I thought, ‘Is this how they make movies? I don’t want to do this with my life.’ I hadn’t slept the night before because the scene was so early, and when they put me in a costume, the clothes itched me.”

In Me, Natalie, Pacino portrays a player named Tony who yanks Duke’s Natalie Miller onto the dance floor at a party before she can leave. He barely pays attention to her as they begin to sway. “You dancin’ or taking a tour?” Duke cracks, and Pacino replies, “I’m dancin’, whadya think. Come on.”

“I danced with Patty and said my lines to her — ‘You have a nice body, you know that? Listen, do you put out?’ — and had absolutely no understanding of what the f— I was talking about or why I was saying it or what it would look like. It went in the film. My first film credit,” Pacino wrote.

Pacino actually leaves out Tony’s slimiest line. After Duke replies that she doesn’t “put out,” Tony drops her hands, cuts in on another couple, and says to her, “I don’t know what I’m doing talkin’ to you. Somebody like you should be asking me.”

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The Godfather actor would go on to play other skeezy and misogynistic characters over the course of his historic career. It isn’t the content of Tony’s character that Pacino recalls with bitterness, but his own naiveté with respect to screen acting, his inability to make the role his own, and the subsequent confusion those things brought to his on-set experience.

Later in the memoir, when describing the impact of his groundbreaking queer Dog Day Afternoon character, Pacino wrote, “none of that enters into my consideration. I am an actor portraying a character in a film. I am playing the part because I think I can bring something to the role,” not because he has any particular opinion about the character’s personality.

“This is just who I am and always was,” he wrote in Sonny Boy. “I look at a situation and I say, what am I doing here? And it seems to not matter where it is, what situation I’m in, I want to leave. I don’t leave, because I really don’t want to be rude, so I stay.”

Because he stayed to film his single scene in Me, Natalie, he was able to land a starring role in The Panic in Needle Park two years later. That led to The Godfather, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon, Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, and the rest, which is history.

Sonny Boy is available now.