Al Pacino Explains Why He Originally Turned Down Dog Day Afternoon

Al Pacino’s role in Dog Day Afternoon is one of his most memorable, but he originally turned the movie down.

Pacino, 85, opened up about the movie in a Sept. 21 interview with The Guardian in honor of the film’s 50th anniversary. In the movie, the actor played Sonny Wortzik, who, together with Sal (John Cazale), tries to rob a bank in Brooklyn to fund his partner’s gender-transition surgery. It soon turns into a hostage situation. 

Martin Bregman, who had been Pacino’s manager and produced 1973’s Serpico (which had earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor), approached him to do the movie.

“He told me he wanted me to do it, and I had read it and thought it was well-written, but I didn’t want to do it,” Pacino said. “I was in London at the time, and I thought, I’m running out of gas. I don’t know if I could do this again.”

The actor had just played Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II (earning his second Oscar nomination for playing the mafia boss), and he wasn’t sure he could go to such a heavy place again.

“It seemed having that kind of intensity again and going through that was too close, I thought, to The Godfather II, which was an intense experience in a lot of ways — not the actual work but everything that had been happening in my personal life was affecting me,” Pacino said. 

So he turned it down. “I thought, all right, I understand it’s a great offer and thank you but I don’t think I can do this. I’d like to pass,” he said. “Once again, I’ve got some kind of gun and I’m gonna go in a bank and rob it: I don’t want to go through that.”

But Bregman called him again to give him a second chance to consider. “I read the text and realize this is more than what I even thought it was. This is an interesting, powerful piece of work. I knew [director Sidney Luimet] was involved, who I loved; we did Serpico together.”

“The first thought I had was, why did I pass this up? Where was I in my head?” Pacino said. He decided to accept the part. The film also let him act alongside his long-time friend Cazale — who played Fredo in The Godfather films — for one more time on-screen. Cazale died in 1978. 

Though he’d accepted the part, Pacino told The Guardian he struggled to get into his role. “For some reason, I felt as though I didn’t know who the character I was playing was,” he said. When he watched back what they’d filmed, he thought, “What am I doing, where am I, who am I, where am I going?”

“I went home that night, took half a gallon of white wine, which I don’t usually drink, for some reason and spent the whole night finding a character within myself from the script,” he said. “I come in the next day and of course Lumet is looking at me like, what happened, Al? The cast — my friends — are saying, ‘I think he’s having a breakdown.’ ”

But Pacino said it was exactly what he needed to play the part. “I was becoming somebody else, I think. I was becoming the guy that’s in the film. I don’t know to this day if I was kidding myself or what. But I did go through that, and it helped me. Let’s put it that way: whether I was right or wrong to do it, it did help me with it. I had something to work with personally.”

Pacino ultimately received his fourth Oscar nomination for Dog Day Afternoon. In total, he is a nine-time nominee with one win, for 1993’s Scent of a Woman.

The Bear stars Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach will appear in a new stage adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon on Broadway in spring 2026.