Al Pacino Details COVID Near-Death Experience: “My Pulse Was Gone”

Four years later, Al Pacino is opening up about his near-death experience with COVID-19.

The Academy Award winner revealed his “pulse was gone” after he had a bad reaction to steroids while being treated for a life-threatening Coronavirus infection back in 2020.

“It was so — you’re here, you’re not,” he told The New York Times. “I thought: Wow, you don’t even have your memories. You have nothing. Strange porridge.”

Pacino recounted, “What happened was, I felt not good — unusually not good. Then I had a fever, and I was getting dehydrated and all that. So I got someone to get me a nurse to hydrate me. I was sitting there in my house, and I was gone. Like that. I didn’t have a pulse. In a matter of minutes they were there — the ambulance in front of my house. I had about six paramedics in that living room, and there were two doctors, and they had these outfits on that looked like they were from outer space or something. 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.'”

The Godfather star explained that he “didn’t see the white light or anything,” noting, “There’s nothing there. 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?”

He admitted his 50-year body of work was “consolation” during the experience, “and having children is a consolation. It’s natural, I guess, to have a different view of death as you get older. It’s just the way it is. I didn’t ask for it. Just comes, like a lot of things just come.”

Pacino, who welcomed his youngest son Roman last year with producer Noor Alfallah, is known for his roles in The Godfather (1972), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Cruising (1980), Scarface (1983), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Carlito’s Way (1993), Heat (1995), The Devil’s Advocate (1997), The Irishman (2019) and House of Gucci (2021).

Pacino’s latest movie Modì, Three Days on the Wing of Madness had its world premiere at last week’s 72nd San Sebastián International Film Festival.