Al Pacino turned down Han Solo after ‘The Godfather’ made him famous

The Godfather turned Al Pacino from a small-time, hustling stage thespian to an international movie star. Almost immediately, offers for lucrative and high profile roles started pouring in, but Pacino paid them no mind.

In his new memoir Sonny Boy, Pacino writes that “The Godfather followed me everywhere I went and overshadowed everything I did. I was shy about it, and the world wouldn’t let me be shy. I was absolutely confounded by all the commotion. After The Godfather, they would have let me play anything. They offered me the role of Han Solo in Star Wars.”

Pacino didn’t reject the role on principle. He at least gave the script a shot: “So there I am, reading Star Wars. I gave it to Charlie. I said, ‘Charlie, I can’t make anything out of this.’ He calls me back. ‘Neither can I.’ So I didn’t do it.”

 “Charlie” is Charles Laughton, not to be confused with Charles Laughton, the Academy Award-winning star of The Night of the Hunter and Witness for the Prosecution. Charlie Laughton was an acting teacher who rose to prominence in the 1960s at the Herbert Berghof Studio. He became a lifelong friend and mentor to Pacino, alongside the famous Lee Strasberg, with whom Pacino trained at the Actors Studio.

It was this very training that has kept Pacino away from blockbusters, franchises, and spectacle cinema virtually his whole career. With the exception of his role in 2007’s Ocean’s Thirteen, and unless you count The Godfather trilogy as a franchise in the vein of George Lucas’s Stars Wars prequels, Pacino has stayed on the straight and narrow road of non-IP, auteur-directed films from original screenplays.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Pacino describes Laughton as having “possessed a literary brilliance that I wish I had for myself,” and it was his tutelage that endowed him with his acting philosophy: “Life’s on the wire, man. That’s my acting, my life. When I work, I’m on the wire. When I’m going for it. When I’m taking chances. I want to take chances. I want to fly and fail. I want to bang into something when I do it, because it’s how I know I’m alive. It’s what’s kept me alive.”

The role of Han Solo in 1977’s Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope of course went to Harrison Ford, whose career until that point looked a lot like Pacino’s. He’d just come off a run of critically-acclaimed films aimed more at the art house than the box office, starting with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and winding through two films with Pacino’s Godfather director, Francis Ford Coppola — American Graffiti and The Conversation.

Star Wars had a similar effect on Ford’s career as The Godfather had on Pacino’s, but transformed him instead from a indie darling to Hollywood’s most bankable leading man.

Pacino also wasn’t the only actor Ford had to beat out to win the part of Han Solo. Sylvester Stallone has spoken about auditioning, and being rejected for the role, and you can even watch Kurt Russell’s audition tape. Burt Reynolds told Business Insider in 2016 that, like Pacino, he was offered and turned down the part. “I didn’t want to play that kind of role at the time,” he said. “Now I regret it. I wish I would have done it.”

Reynolds also claimed he was offered Pacino’s Godfather role on a 2018 episode of Watch What Happens Live, joking he was “flattered” that Marlon Brando reportedly threatened to quit if he was hired. Pacino doesn’t list Reynolds alongside Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, and Ryan O’Neal among the A-listers who Paramount wanted for the part in Sonny Boy, but it’s entirely possible, given, as Pacino puts it in unambiguous terms, “Paramount didn’t want me to play Michael Corleone.”