The Biggest Bombshells from Al Pacino'sSonny Boy:His Bond with Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor and Turning DownStar Wars

Mar. 15, 2025

Al Pacino and the cover of ‘Sonny Boy.'.Photo:Scott Kirkland/PictureGroup for Shutterstock; Penguin Press

Scott Kirkland/PictureGroup for Shutterstock; Penguin Press

Al Pacinois getting candid about his storied career in film, his many encounters with iconic figures in Hollywood over the years and some of the most traumatic moments of his life in his new memoir.

In his bookSonny Boy,out Oct. 15 from Penguin Press, Pacino, 84, opens about many of his encounters with celebrities — some of whom he considers close friends — as well as the more difficult situations he has found himself in over the years, including his battle with alcoholism and his mother’s mental health struggles.

“It was due,”he told PEOPLEof his decision to write the memoir. “I’m in my 85th year. When you get there and you start experiencing age, you understand why they do put things down.”

TheScarfaceactor titled the book after the childhood nickname his mother, Rose, gave him from the Al Jolson song of the same name. Pacino also told PEOPLE that he wanted to leave a record for his loved ones, including his four children, Julie, 34 (with acting coach Jan Tarrant), 23-year-old twins Anton and Olivia (with actressBeverly D’Angelo) and Roman, 16 months (withproducer Noor Alfallah).

He added: “At least according to me, I’ve had quite a big life.”

Here are the biggest bombshells from Pacino’s memoir,Sonny Boy,available now wherever books are sold.

His mother attempted suicide when he was a boy

The cover of ‘Sonny Boy.'.Penguin Press

Penguin Press

According to Pacino, one of the most difficult early memories from his childhood growing up in a tenement apartment in New York City’s South Bronx, where he lived with his mom and grandparents, came when he was just six years old. Although he writes that he didn’t understand what exactly happened at the time and that it was “period of time that is kind of a blank to me,” he does recall the morning it happened.

Pacino recalled that his mom was crying and kissing him as she laced up his shoes and dressed him in a sweater so he could play outside with some children in the neighborhood. After heading outside to play, he suddenly saw people running towards his apartment.

“Someone said to me, ‘I think it’s your mother.’ I didn’t believe it. I thought, How could they say a thing like that? My mother? That’s not true.”

“This was not explained to me; I had to piece together what had happened for myself,” he wrote elsewhere, “Years later, I made the filmDog Day Afternoon, and one of its final images, showing John Cazale’s character getting brought away on a stretcher, already dead, would make me think of the moment I saw my mother brought out to that ambulance and taken away.”

Pacino ‘always knew’ he’d be a star

Pacino in 1980.Movie Poster Image Art/Getty

Movie Poster Image Art/Getty

Even as a young man, Pacino had faith in himself — and in a “Higher Power” — that he could make it as an actor, as his friend and late mentor British actor Charlie Laughton once told him.

“When I was about 19 or 20,” theGodfatheractor recalled, “Charlie and I had finished one of our wanderings full of walking and talking and we came back to my Bronx apartment. As I looked in my mailbox, he was going up the stairs. He stopped on the stairway, looked back at me, paused, and then said, ‘Al, you’re going to be a big star.'”

“I said to him, “’ know, Charl. I know,’ and I meant it,” he continued. “Now I’m not religious or anything. But I feel there’s a spirit. You don’t even have to call it God. In A.A. they call it the Higher Power. Whatever it is, whatever you think it may be, that was mine. I believed it would happen, although it wasn’t something I was preoccupied with at the time or really thought about at all. I just sort of assumed that was what was going to happen, and I accepted it.”

“Whatever this acting thing was, I could do that,” he added.

He remembers an iconic lunch with Marlon Brando — who ate chicken cacciatore with his bare hands

Pacino in ‘The Godfather Part II.'.Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock

Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock

Looking back on one of his many celebrity encounters of the course of his career, Pacino writes about the time he spent withMarlon Brando— and how the renowned actor made an impression on him as he was covered in food.

Pacino recalled howThe GodfatherdirectorFrancis Ford Coppolatold him he should have dinner with his co-star Brando so that they figure out how to play a family on screen. According to Pacino, the thought of sitting down with “the greatest living actor of our time” “f—— scared” him.

“I had my lunch with Marlon in a modest room in the hospital where we were filming on Fourteenth Street,” he wrote. “He was sitting on one hospital bed, I was sitting on the other … And he was eating chicken cacciatore with his hands. His hands were full of red sauce. So was his face. And that’s all I could think about the whole time.”

“He disposed of it somehow without getting up. He looked at me in a quizzical way, as if to ask, what are you thinking about? I was wondering, What is he going to do with his hands? Should I get him a napkin? Before I could, he spread both his hands across the white hospital bed and smeared the sheets with red sauce, without even thinking about it and he kept on talking. And I thought, Is that how movie stars act?”

According to Pacino, Brando was still kind to him as a young actor, despite the messy eating.

“When our lunch was over, Marlon looked at me with those gentle eyes of his and said, ‘Yeah, kid, you’re gonna be all right,'” he wrote.

He turned down a role in ‘Star Wars’

Pacino in 2023.Dominik Bindl/Getty

Dominik Bindl/Getty

Although Pacino has spoken about it candidly before, he opened up about his decision topass on the role of Han Soloin the 1977 filmStar Wars: A New Hope, which famously went toHarrison Ford.

“AfterThe Godfather, they would have let me play anything. They offered me the role of Han Solo inStar Wars. So, there I am, readingStar Wars,” he wrote.

“I gave it to Charlie,” he continued, referring to Laughton. “I said, ‘Charlie, I can’t make anything out of this.’ He calls me back. ‘Neither can I.’ So I didn’t do it.”

Pacino once made a major faux-pas when meeting Jackie Kennedy

Pacino and De Niro.Getty

Getty

TheScent of a Womanactor recalled how early in his career, a youngJackie Kennedyand her daughterCarolineattended his Broadway production of Shakespeare’sRichard IIIand he had the chance to meet them — but one thing still makes him cringe years later.

As he was “slumped” in a chair in his dressing room after a tiring performance, Pacino remembered how he suddenly put his hand out for Kennedy to kiss.

“God only knows what I was thinking. Why would I ever do that? Please tell me, what’s wrong with me?” he wrote. “I must have believed I was dreaming that Jackie Onassis was there. Perhaps I was hallucinating that she was doing the play with me, so she was my queen—​­ and as the queen, after all, she must now kiss the hand of the king.”

He struggled with his sobriety as his star rose

A still from 1983’s ‘Scarface.'.Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock

Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock

The star writes candidly about his struggles with alcoholism and drug abuse inSonny Boy,revealing that he felt fame was “isolating me and affecting me deeply” as a younger actor — and he didn’t feel he had any good ways to cope with the intensity that came with it.

“And the way I dealt with it was I took drugs and drank. I wasn’t living the high life. My manner of coping was more ­low-​key and private,” Pacino wrote.

“I thought I was fine. I didn’t drink when I ­ worked —​­ that was my big thing. Work was always first. It was what gave me identity and solace, made me feel I was closer to who I am,” he added. “But God, drinking was a way of life for me.”

He often competed with his ‘very dear friend’ Robert De Niro for roles

Pacino and De Niro.Marco Grob/Variety/Penske Media via Getty Images

Marco Grob/Variety/Penske Media via Getty Images

It’s well-known in Hollywood that Pacino and fellow actorRobert De Nirohave been close friends for decades, but he writes inSonny Boythat the pair were often forced to view each other as competitors, as they went out to audition for the same roles, time and time again.

“While there are things we have in common, we are as different from each other as any two people can be,” Pacino wrote of himself and De Niro, 81. “And there was competition between us. There had to be. Especially when the offers coming in were similar; roles that would go to either one of us, and that either of us could have played. There, and only there, is the stain of competition.”

Despite their occasional rivalry, Pacino noted that the pair remained bonded forever over their love of acting and film.

“Bob and I connected through ­ film —​­ it was film that ignited him, that gave him a medium and a means of expression, and we both related to the art in film,” he wrote.

He became ‘fast friends’ with Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino on February 14, 1982.Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty

Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty

Pacino recounts in his memoir that he and the “great movie star"Elizabeth Taylormet while they were both doing theater on the east coast, and became “fast friends.”

“We would hang out, just enjoying each other’s company,” he wrote of theCleopatrastar. “She was a great actress with a gentle heart … We would talk about everything. I would always ask her about Richard Burton, who she’d been married to twice, and who was my favorite actor along with Marlon; sometimes she’d indulge me and sometimes she’d brush me off.”

“She was a regular person and a walking, talking treasure,” Pacino wrote.

Sonny Boyis available now, wherever books are sold.

source: people.com