After spending last weekend in Italy for the Venice International Film Festival, 74-year old actor Al Pacino is currently making the rounds at the Toronto International Film Festival with his 35-year old actress girlfriend Lucila Solá. But while I’m sure that Pacino’s Q&A session yesterday at the TIFF was full of incredible insight for all of his fans and peers in attendance, it’s nothing compared to the little nugget that he dropped in an interview with Deadline’s Nancy Tartaglione. It turns out that Pacino, like most of us, thought that Guardians of the Galaxy was nonstop fun.
On Saturday, Pacino told Tartaglione that GotG was “the most entertaining, inventive, beautiful film,” so naturally, when she had the chance to speak with him again, the Deadline writer asked the Godfather star to not only elaborate on that statement, but also if he’d be up to join the Marvel Universe anytime soon. If anything, judging by his attire, personality and taste in women, he could probably play Tony Stark 30 years in the future.
He told me he’d seen the film with his young children. “It was not something I would readily go see, but my kids got me to go, and one has to draw the line at where prejudice starts and where it ends — that was good stuff!” He had even more praise: “I recognized the ingenious stuff they were doing; the invention, the attractiveness of the way they were performing it. It had Shakespearian feeling to it at times. I was caught up in the big screen, the great sound…” (Via Deadline)
The key to reading that quote is to imagine Pacino in a theater with his twin teenage sons, walking around and staring in amazement at all of the colors and action on the screen, before he placed his ear up to the speaker and motioned for the other theater patrons to try it. As for the big question, would he take a role in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 or simply any other Marvel movie, Pacino is totally down, so long as it doesn’t confuse the hell out of him.
“I would do anything that I could understand in terms of how I fit in it. And you know, of course if I could fit in it. Anything’s possible,” he told me. Then he winked, “You know, I did Dick Tracy and I got an Oscar nomination, so come on. I mean, what can I say?”
I don’t have an idea of who Pacino could play, and I don’t really care. If he shows up to work with even half of the awesomeness of Big Boy Caprice to put into his character, it’ll be an instant winner. Although, it would be pretty great if he played Kronos as himself, just an old dude in a black scarf shouting at everyone.