Al Pacino Remembers Messy Lunch With Marlon Brando

Marlon Brando and Al Pacino might have starred in The Godfather over 50 years ago, but we’re still learning more about their time working together.

Pacino, 84, is telling brand-new stories from the set of the Oscar-winning film in his new book, Sonny Boy: A Memoir.

In an excerpt published in The Guardian on Saturday, October 12, Pacino told a story about the first time he sat down to eat with Brando — and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

“I had been introduced to Marlon Brando briefly at a dinner with all the cast members before we started filming. Now, as we were getting ready to do the scene where Michael finds Vito in the hospital, [director] Francis [Ford Coppola] said, “Why don’t you and Brando have lunch together?” he wrote.

Pacino recalled that despite Brando being one of his heroes — he really didn’t want to meet with him.

“The discomfort I felt at just the thought of it — You mean I have to have lunch with him? Seriously, it f—ing scared me. He was the greatest living actor of our time. I grew up on actors like him — larger than life people like Clark Gable and Cary Grant. They were famous when fame meant something, before the bloom went off the rose. But Francis said you have to and so I did,” he wrote.

Pacino wrote that the two shared their lunch at the hospital where they were set to film the scene together.

“He was sitting on one hospital bed, I was sitting on the other. He was asking me questions: Where am I from? How long have I been an actor? 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. Whatever his words were, my conscious mind was fixated by the stain-covered sight in front of me. He was talking — gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble — and I was just mesmerized,” wrote Pacino.

The Scarface actor said he wasn’t sure how Brando would wipe his hands after the messy meal.

“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? You can do anything.”

Despite his fears, Pacino said that the Superman actor was extremely kind.

“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.’ I was taught to be polite and grateful, so I probably just said thank you to him. I was too scared to say anything at all. What I should have said was “Can you define ‘all right?’”

Sonny Boy: A Memoir is set for release on October 15.