Do we like Al Pacino?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent on the record, no harmful words of his own found, with one old film he later called exploitative and a thin trail on causes.
Pacino grew up in the South Bronx with his mum Rose, in a three-room walk-up shared with his grandparents. She called him “Sonny Boy”, which became the title of his memoir. He left school at 16 to chase theatre and bounced through jobs as a messenger, janitor, switchboard operator and usher, getting fired twice along the way.
The break came on stage, then The Godfather in 1972, where he was cast as Michael Corleone over a studio that wanted an established star. Oscar nominations for Serpico, The Godfather Part II and Dog Day Afternoon followed in consecutive years, then a Best Actor win for Scent of a Woman. Nine nominations all up, most recently for The Irishman.
The one real stain for this crowd is Cruising (1980), where he played a cop hunting a killer in New York's gay scene. It drew near-daily protests and a boycott call. In his memoir he agreed the film was exploitative of LGBTQ+ people, and admitted he stayed quiet at the time because he'd been paid well.
What he did next matters more than the regret. He says he put his entire Cruising pay into an irrevocable trust that funded charities, quietly, because he didn't want it to be a P.R. stunt. Where the money went isn't public. An apology alone wouldn't count here, but giving up the money is an act, and it fits.
On the harm test, we found no attacks on trans or gay people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate from him, and no pattern of working with people who push that stuff. The search for political statements came back thin, so we aren't putting any beliefs on him. His recent work, including the Tribeca thriller Killing Castro, looks like ordinary film work.
The good-person side is clean in what we read. No convictions or findings against him turned up, and the guild's award announcement singled out his charitable work, including disaster relief, hunger and poverty, and support for local theatre. The record on specific causes is thinner than we'd like, so that's why he's an eight and not a ten.