In 1979, Al Pacino was fired from the one role he always wanted most. He never got the chance again
Credit: Far Out / Warner Bros.
Despite being one of the greatest actors on the planet by 1979, a position he’d already held for several years, Al Pacino still wasn’t beyond being unceremoniously fired from a role.
At the time, he had four Academy Award nominations, and a fifth would arrive the following year for his work in ...And Justice for All, but all the accolades in the world weren’t enough to compensate for a director who refused to be challenged on the material by their leading man.
To make matters worse, the role in question was the one that Pacino had always dreamed of playing, and in the decades to come, he would constantly reiterate both his desire to embody it and lament the fact that the part he desired most was the one that always remained frustratingly out of his grasp.
That said, it was kind of his own fault. While actors challenge directors all the time, and in many cases, they’ve been proven right, you can’t really deviate from William Shakespeare. You can, to a certain extent, in terms of updating or reinventing the setting, story, and characters, but when it comes to one of the most foundational elements of one of the playwright’s most famous works? Absolutely not.
The Oscar-winning icon has rued the fact that, throughout his legendary career, “No one has asked me to play Hamlet,” which isn’t true. Joseph Papp did, and surrounded Pacino with a heavyweight supporting cast that included Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, and Raúl Juliá for the New York Shakespeare Festival in ’79, but it was a short-lived thing.
Pacino, who’s also called the “to be or not to be” monologue, the single greatest piece of dialogue that’s ever been written in human history, had finally landed the big one, the very role he’d been dreaming of since he took his first steps into thespianism. In one conversation, he completely fucked it.
“Hamlet speaks to the ghost, and I remember saying to Joseph Papp, ‘I’m not interested in speaking to my father right now as the ghost: I want to save that, I’m interested in speaking to my father before he became a ghost,’” the star explained. “Shortly after that, I was fired.”
Clearly, Papp had no time for one of his actors to suggest that maybe one of the most pivotal moments of the play was ripe for reinvention, mostly because Pacino didn’t want to do it. All he had to do was back down, but since he didn’t, the director gave him his marching orders, and having spent the better part of 50 years wishing he’d played Hamlet, it seems fair to say he made the wrong call.
He’s done plenty of Shakespeare in the years since, on both stage and screen, but he’s never done his own version of Hamlet. Obviously, he could have, and it would have saved him half a century of regrets, but in this case, sticking to his guns and refusing to back down cost him dearly.
