In another galaxy, another time the role of Han Solo could have been played by a plethora of different actors. With George Lucas and Brian DePalma casting Star Wars and Carrie at the same time and Lucas casting the trio of Han, Luke and Leia for their chemistry, any one of Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill not being there could have changed the casting for the other two. Imagine that instead of Ford, Al Pacino was cast as Solo, a role he was offered after his success in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather but turned down as he didn’t believe he could do anything with the role as written on the page.
In his new memoir Sonny Boy, Pacino writes that “The Godfather followed me everywhere I went and overshadowed everything I did. I was shy about it, and the world wouldn’t let me be shy. I was absolutely confounded by all the commotion. After The Godfather, they would have let me play anything. They offered me the role of Han Solo in Star Wars.”
Pacino didn’t reject the role on principle. He at least gave the script a shot: “So there I am, reading Star Wars. I gave it to Charlie. I said, ‘Charlie, I can’t make anything out of this.’ He calls me back. ‘Neither can I.’ So I didn’t do it.”
“Charlie” is Charles Laughton, not to be confused with Charles Laughton, the Academy Award-winning star of The Night of the Hunter and Witness for the Prosecution. Charlie Laughton was an acting teacher who rose to prominence in the 1960s at the Herbert Berghof Studio. He became a lifelong friend and mentor to Pacino, alongside the famous Lee Strasberg, with whom Pacino trained at the Actors Studio.
It was this very training that has kept Pacino away from blockbusters, franchises, and spectacle cinema virtually his whole career. With the exception of his role in 2007’s Ocean’s Thirteen, and unless you count The Godfather trilogy as a franchise in the vein of George Lucas’s Stars Wars prequels, Pacino has stayed on the straight and narrow road of non-IP, auteur-directed films from original screenplays.
Clearly the writer of the piece forgot Pacino chewing the scenery in Warren Beatty’s 1990 film Dick Tracy, but that aside be sure to check out Pacino’s new memoir Sonny Boy, available via Amazon and other outlets.
