Al Pacino Says Warren Beatty ‘Seduced’ Him into Starring in ‘Dick Tracy’

Al Pacino needed some coaxing to join the cast of the 1990 comic-book movie, Dick Tracy.

Luckily, director Warren Beatty was up for the challenge, as Pacino recalled during a Q&A at the film’s 35th anniversary screening at Beyond Fest in Santa Monica, Calif.

In the film, Pacino plays Big Boy Caprice, a gangster said to be loosely based on Al Capone. Of learning about the noir parody film, Pacino recalled, “Warren was looking for an actor to play Big Boy. So he and I, he met me and we would talk and [he’d] say, ‘I want to know what actors who could play this part.’ ”

The actor, 85, continued, “So I look at it, I said, ‘Well, strange ones I guess.’ Who would want to do it? And then he just slowly, I mean, so seductively… It took about a couple of months, actually. [He] was always meeting me and calling and saying… and finally got down to, ‘Are you trying to tell me something, Warren?’ Finally, he says, ‘Yes, you can do it.’ ”

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While it was such a departure from his role as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, it was welcome to the actor, who said, “I was really born to play Big Boy. I started out as a comic.”

“That’s shocking, especially since I’m so not funny. But as a youngster, I was an actor very young and I was hanging around the streets of New York and the South Bronx, which is where I come from, [which is] to say that beloved home and origins where I learned so much about certain things.”

“New York in the sixties was so much fun. So many things were happening, like now, always. But then it was something with the theater, it was like Paris in the early 1900s. The cafes… You walk down the street, you get [to pass] Bob Dylan. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody knew [who] I was, and it was filled with this life.”

Getting back to Dick Tracy, Pacino shared, “It’s an amazing job they did, all the actors did.”

The film was also accompanied by not one, but three soundtracks: an orchestral score by Danny Elfman; Dick Tracy, the official soundtrack featuring k.d. lang, Ice-T, Jerry Lee Lewis and more; and
Madonna’s I’m Breathless: Music from and Inspired by the Film Dick Tracy.

In a 1994 interview with Q Magazine, Madonna called the album “the favorite record that I’ve made,” adding, “I love every one of those songs.”

Of her continued interest in acting after Dick Tracy, Madonna said, “Well, I know there are many people who think I have no acting career. It’s very difficult. Because I’m a huge ‘celebrity,’ quote-unquote, I have a lot of baggage dragging behind me, and it’s hard for people to disassociate the media portrayal of me when they’re watching the film.”

“Very often people either can’t believe it’s me playing a character, or, for instance, in Body Of Evidence, I think people actually thought that was me, because it came out at the time of my Sex book,” she noted. “So it’s hard for people to separate, and I have the extra challenge of finding the role that will rise above all of that.”