Al Pacino is one of the greatest living film actors, iconic for his roles in classics like The Godfather trilogy, Scarface, and Dog Day Afternoon. Now 84, he’s still going strong: he continues to act in films, and even recently became a dad again.
But recently, the Oscar-winner revealed that he had a near-death experience after contracting Covid-19 — and what the experience made him think about the afterlife.
In a new interview with the New York Times, Pacino opened up about nearly dying from Covid back in 2020. He said he was at home and began to feel “unusually not good,” experiencing dehydration and a fever.
After calling for a nurse, Pacino says he suddenly lost vital signs: “I was sitting there in my house, and I was gone. Like that. I didn’t have a pulse,” he said.
Pacino said that minutes later he woke up, surrounded by doctors and paramedics in protective gear (“like they were from outer space or something,” Pacino says).
“It was kind of shocking to open your eyes and see that. Everybody was around me, and they said: ‘He’s back. He’s here,’” Pacino recalled to the Times.
“Everybody thought I was dead,” he told People Magazine. “The nurse that was taking care of me said, ‘I don’t feel a pulse on this guy.’”
“I thought I experienced death. I might not have. I don’t think I have, really. I know I made it.”
Many people who have had near-death experiences like this have reported sensations resembling an afterlife: visions of deceased relatives, beckoning them to “come to the light,” etc.
But Pacino says he did not have any such visions of a great beyond — in fact, his brush with death affirmed to him that the end really is the end.
“I didn’t see the white light or anything. There’s nothing there,” he told the New York Times.
“As Hamlet says, ‘To be or not to be’; ‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn, no traveler returns.’ And he says two words: ‘no more.’ It was no more. You’re gone. I’d never thought about it in my life. But you know actors: It sounds good to say I died once. What is it when there’s no more?”
While many might find the finality of death existentially scary, Pacino says that he takes consolation in his children, and the enduring body of work he’ll leave behind.
And it turns out the brush with death left Pacino largely unfazed: asked by People if it changed how he lives his life, the actor replied “not at all.”
Even in his advanced age, Pacino continues to be a prolific actor: in recent years he appeared in films including Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (earning his 9th Academy Award nomination for playing Jimmy Hoffa) and Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci.
And last summer at the age of 83, Pacino became a father again, welcoming his fourth child with then-29-year-old girlfriend Noor Alfallah.
Al Pacino is one of the greatest film actors of all time, and we’re glad he survived his brush with death and is still with us!
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