Martin Sheen Asked Al Pacino to Play Role After Illness—'Way Over My Head'
Al Pacino has revealed that he was forced to step in and replace Martin Sheen for a theater role when they were aspiring actors, despite being ill-prepared for the job.
Like Sheen, Pacino has enjoyed a decades-long acting career that has landed him among the industry's most lauded. Over the years, Pacino, 84 , has accepted an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards, among others.
But Pacino has revealed that when he was a young aspiring actor, he got an unexpected push into the limelight when his friend Sheen, also 84, was struck down with laryngitis while starring in off-Broadway play The Wicked Cooks.
Recounting the moment on a recent episode of the podcast WTF with Marc Maron, Pacino said that after Sheen "nailed" his small role in Jack Gelber's 1959 play The Connection, he also benefitted and started to get more work.
"He was in a play and he saw me on the subway," Pacino said of Sheen. "He said, 'Come, be my understudy. [It would] honor me if you would be my [understudy] ... He had this part, and I couldn't even understand the play. It was way over my head."
Worse was that, at the time, Pacino was unaware of what an understudy actually did.
"I didn't realize understudying is you understudy the part," he told fellow actor Maron. "Of course, I didn't do that. I just was wandering in the theater."
"I was sort of very introverted when I hung around the theater people I didn't know," Pacino said. "So I was very shy, but I always had this look on my face of, you know, an anarchic look. People don't like that."
Pacino said that after some time, Sheen informed him that he had come down with laryngitis.
"He's joking. I know he's kidding," Pacino said of his reaction at the time.
"He says, 'I can't go on.' Can you imagine? Eighteen years old ... Of course, I don't know the play. I don't know anything ... They wanted me to play a soldier—no lines, marches around. I couldn't do it. I couldn't follow the marches where it was going. My mind was somewhere, you know?"
A hoarse Sheen attempted to prepare Pacino for the role. "I'm really, this is a lost cause," he recalled, adding that he told his friend, "Please, I can't do this."
The show's director, who had assumed that Pacino being introverted was a result of him being a Method actor, then took over with preparing him.
"He says, 'Come here. I'll make you do a part.' He says, 'Here, say this. Look, what are you looking at over there?' Then he starts to criticize me. He says, 'You Method actors!'
"I wasn't a Method actor, I was a kid. But somehow that look on my face sort of [convinced him otherwise]."
