Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, two of our greatest actors, are longtime friends.
They’ve also appeared in the same films — including The Godfather Part II, Righteous Kill and The Irishman — and sometimes been up for the same roles.
Here are five times the old friends almost played each other’s parts.
Robert De Niro Could Have Played Michael Corleone
Sean Levy writes in the excellent biography De Niro: A Life that Francis Ford Coppola considered “a number of names for every key role” in 1972’s The Godfather – including De Niro and Pacino. Though the role of Michael Corleone went to Pacino, Coppola was impressed enough with De Niro to consider him for the role of Michael’s brother, Sonny, which ultimately went to James Caan.
So Pacino and De Niro’t get to play brothers — but they did play father and son when De Niro won the part of Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, taking on the younger version of Marlon Brando’s Godfather.
Robert De Niro Took Over for Al Pacino in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
When Pacino was offered the part of Michael Corleone in The Godfather, he almost couldn’t take it because he had committed to the 1971 Jimmy Breslin adaptation The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, according to a 2014 New Yorker profile. Producer Irwin Winkler refused to release Pacino, and so Pacino pleaded with playwright Israel Horovitz to intervene.
“I went crazy with Irwin, and he said, ‘You find me a young Italian actor that’s as good as Pacino, and I’ll let him out,’” Horovitz told The New Yorker. Horovitz said he took the producer to see De Niro in a play, and De Niro got the part. Winkler describes it a little differently in his book A Life in Movies. He said he had heard about Robert De Niro from De Niro’s early independent films, The Wedding Party and Greetings, and that after Pacino dropped out, “Bob De Niro came in, and we instantly wanted him to play Mario.”
A fun aside: Harvey Keitel referenced The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight while appearing with Pacino and De Niro at the Hollywood premiere of The Irishman. Director Martin Scorsese introduced Keitel, Scorsese, Pacino and the rest of the cast, and then there was confusion about which way they were supposed to exit. “The gang that couldn’t shoot straight!” quipped Keitel.
Al Pacino Could Have Starred in Taxi Driver
Levy writes that early in the development of 1976’s Taxi Driver, there was talk of Jeff Bridges or Al Pacino playing the lead role that went, of course, to Robert De Niro. The film became one of the iconic collaborations between De Niro and Scorsese, and we never got to see Pacino with a mohawk.
A year after Taxi Driver, Pacino played a race car driver in Bobby Deerfield. Pacino told interviewer Lawrence Grobel in 1979 that the film is about “avoiding — knowing when to duck, when to move, when to hide, when to roll with the punches. That is what I call my way of survival. I’ve had a lot of selfish incidents in my life. One day I just turned around and said, I am a selfish b——, and I don’t have to be.”