Say hello to his little friend.
Al Pacino, 84, is fearless onscreen, diving headfirst into portraying sex or violence, but in his recent memoir “Sonny Boy,” the Hollywood legend admitted that he’s not a fan of filming steamy moments.
“I’m not usually one to perform graphic lovemaking scenes,” he wrote, “and I don’t think many other actors like to do them either. It can become sort of borderline porn.”
The “Scarface” star was reflecting on shooting the 1989 movie “Sea of Love,” where he has a sex scene with Ellen Barkin, 70.
“Though I had played romantic leads in other movies,” Pacino wrote, that movie, “became renowned for a long, slow sex scene where Ellen Barkin holds me against a wall and gives me a bit of a pat-down before our two characters start going at it.”
In his book, the “Serpico” actor gave the director, Harold Becker, credit for “brilliantly” choreographing the scene, but still bemoaned that it wasn’t a walk in the park to film.
In “Sea of Love,” Pacino plays a New York City homicide detective on the hunt for a killer who murdered two men who had put ads in the “lonely hearts” column of their local paper.
Barkin’s character is a suspect, but she also gets hot and heavy with Pacino’s character.
Pacino explained that the movie came along at a time when he was “out of commission for four years.” Before that, he was in “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II,” “Scarface” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” but he’d had a lull following that streak.
It was a hit, earning over $100 million on a $19 million budget.
Pacino admitted that “Sea of Love” pushed him “from having no money to being back in the chips.”
The Oscar winning actor – who welcomed his fourth child in 2023 when Pacino was 83 and his now-ex girlfriend, Noor Alfallah, was 30 – recalled, “Ellen Barkin blew the screen apart, sensually and artistically. What a performance. I was luck to be a part of it.”
Pacino also expressed nostalgia for a bygone era in Hollywood.
“I realize it is futile for me to complain that we’re no longer in an age of movies like ‘A Place in the Sun,’ where Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift could have an entire audience swooning in their seats without ever showing their naked bodies,” he penned in his book.
He described Taylor as a “fast friend” and Clift as having “beauty” and a “soul.”
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