Al Pacino Recalls First Time Getting Punched—’I Hate’ Fighting

Oscar-winning legend Al Pacino recently told podcaster Marc Maron about the first time he ever got punched as a kid.

Now 84 years old, the star of Glengarry Glen Ross and The Irishman was just 13 years old when a boy five years his senior gave him a wallop.

Recalling this scarring experience on the podcast WTF with Marc Maron, the actor suggested the shock of its violent power has stayed with him ever since.

On the air to promote his autobiography Sonny Boy: A Memoir, which hit bookshelves earlier this month, Pacino told Maron: “The first time I got hit, he was 18. I was like 13 or something. He hit me and I said, ‘This is life, this is what’s real.’ I’ll never forget it.”

He added: “I don’t know what brought it on, but I know [my mom] was having a fight with his father about something and he was like…he came at me, and I said something back, so he came to me and hit me once.”

Pacino still isn’t sure whether or not his mom was in a relationship with his attacker’s father at the time, but what he does remember is how hard the blow felt.

“Getting hit like that just went through every fiber of my body and I just felt it big time,” he noted. “Fighting’s ridiculous. I hate it to this day.”

Pacino’s memoir also reveals how his ex-girlfriend actress Diane Keaton helped him out of a financial hole in the 1970s.

“When I finished making The Godfather, I was broke, not that I had ever had any money, but now I owed money. My manager and agents got their cuts of my salary while I had to live on support from Jill Clayburgh,” wrote the actor, later recounting how Keaton went along with him to a meeting with his entertainment lawyer.

“Do you know who he is? Yeah, you’re going to tell me, ‘Oh, he’s an artist.’ No. He. Is. An idiot,” she told the lawyer, before demanding he “take care” of “ignoramus” Pacino when it came to money.

“I could say I got taken advantage of,” Pacino added in his book. “I could blame my accountants. I could blame [my manager] Mary Bregman, who had put me into some sort of tax shelter that went south. I could blame myself, but then I’d have to take responsibility for my own actions.”

Pacino also delves into his heartbreaking sobriety journey in Sonny Boy.