Al Pacino is opening up about a brush with death — four years after he lived to tell the tale.
The legendary actor sat down with PEOPLE and The New York Times separately to discuss his forthcoming memoir, Sonny Boy (out Oct. 15). In the process, he opened up to both outlets about the time he contracted a serious case of Covid-19 in 2020. Things got so bad that he almost didn’t make it. “I thought I experienced death,” he told PEOPLE.
The 84-year-old told the NYT that he “felt not good — unusually not good.” Then, he had a fever and was getting dehydrated, so he had a nurse sent to his home to hydrate him. “I was sitting there in my house, and I was gone. Like that. I didn’t have a pulse,” he said.
He says he must have lost consciousness and told PEOPLE, “When I opened my eyes, there were six paramedics in my living room. There was an ambulance outside the door, and two of my doctors in those space suits [like] on Mars. I looked around and I thought, ‘What happened to me?'”
“Everybody thought I was dead,” he said. Although PEOPLE notes Pacino “technically died,” the actor himself goes back and forth on what actually happened during those scary moments: “I don’t think I died,” he told the magazine. But he told NYT that his pulse was gone: “It was so — you’re here, you’re not.”
In that moment, he thought, “Wow, you don’t even have your memories. You have nothing. Strange porridge.”
Either way, the experience forced Pacino to reflect. “I didn’t see the white light or anything,” he told the Times. “There’s nothing there.” It reminded him of this line in Hamlet: “‘No more.’ It was no more. You’re gone.”
He did agree that having a robust body of work to leave as a legacy after he’s gone gives him some comfort, as is having children — Pacino has four children, three of whom are adults and one, Roman, he and his girlfriend Noor Alfallah welcomed into the world in 2023.
Despite coming right up to death’s door, Pacino told PEOPLE that the close call has “not at all” changed the way he lives his life, and he told the Times he has a rather casual view of death: “It’s just the way it is. I didn’t ask for it. Just comes, like a lot of things just come.”
