(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 5 December 2025 16:45, UK
When you’ve had a career like Al Pacino‘s, how do you even begin to reflect on the highs and lows? With more bucket list moments layering on top of each other year by year, and with the accolades continually stacking up, it must be hard to see the wood for the trees with all the achievements.
Since his debut role in 1969, Pacino has starred in over 68 projects, so pinpointing the very best is never going to be easy. He has the quantity down, but the main thing is the simply staggering quality of Pacino’s filmography.
It’s tough to imagine another performer who has embodied so many truly iconic, culture-defining roles. All fans will recognise Pacino as different characters. To some, he will always be Bobby from The Panic in Needle Park. Others will never forget him in Dog Day Afternoon. Another might forever think of him as Serpico.
But really, who are we kidding? To the majority, Al Pacino will always and forever, inescapably, be Michael Corleone.
Even in Pacino’s own mind, it’s that role in The Godfather that defines his career, standing out even decades later as his favourite role he’s ever taken on. “I think my favourite characterisation has been Michael Corleone,” he said, joining the masses in that opinion.
It seems only right. That was the role that completely changed his life, as Francis Ford Coppola took a chance on the new name and cast him as the leading figure in what would become one of the most well-known franchises in cinematic history.
Bringing him in to play the mafia figure and protagonist of the series, it was a task unlike anything Pacino had faced so far. Still relatively new to on-screen acting and still really only in the infancy of his career, this was a looming task that came early and demanded that he go deep. He had to prove himself, as when Coppola cast Pacino over bigger names like Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford and Warren Beatty, the studio wasn’t happy.
Picking a risky little-known face over a sure-fire celebrity who was bound to bring in box office money, it wasn’t just that Pacino wanted to do the role justice; it was that the actual finances of the film seemed to rely on that, too. Digging into the method-acting techniques he’d learnt from Lee Strasberg, he ran at the task wholeheartedly, and it paid off.
But that’s why he liked it. “It was the most difficult for me to do. It was the most challenging,” he said, proving how much the performer values projects that push him. Nothing great ever comes easy, and to Pacino, his work on The Godfather is proof of that, as the most effort and nervousness that he’s ever put into a role was paid right back when Corleone became a timelessly iconic role that will forever define him.
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