Al Pacino was almost fired from the iconic role of The Godfather

Al Pacino was almost fired while filming The Godfather.

From the start, the studio didn’t want Pacino for the iconic role of mafia boss’s son Michael Corleone, preferring either Ryan O’Neal, Robert Redford or Warren Beatty.

But Pacino had one thing in his favor: director Francis Ford Coppola was in his corner.

But shortly after filming began, problems immediately arose.

They had been filming for about a week and a half and word got around that Paramount was unhappy with Pacino’s performance, the actor recalled in his memoir “Sonny Boy.”

Francis Ford Coppola called Pacino to a meeting at a Lincoln Center restaurant and dropped a bombshell.

“You know how much you mean to me,” said the director, “how much trust I had in you. Well, you can’t do it.”

Coppola showed Pacino footage the next day and the actor had to agree that there was “nothing spectacular here.”

The “Serpico” star explains that he intentionally underestimated Michael.

“My idea was that this guy came out of nowhere,” he writes. “That was the power of that characterization. This was the only way it could work: the emergence of this person, the discovery of his abilities and his potential.”

Luckily for Pacino, Coppola stepped up and filmed the iconic shooting scene “to give the doubters in Hollywood an incentive to believe in me and keep me in the picture.”

It’s unclear whether Coppola did it for Pacino’s benefit, but it certainly served its purpose.

The “Scarface” star writes that he, Al Lettieri, who played heroin dealer Virgil Sollozzo, and Sterling Hayden, who played corrupt cop Captain McCluskey, spent 15 hours filming the scene in which Michael outed them both shot at close range.

Pacino notes that both Lettieri and Hayden were “valuable to me.”

“They knew I was going through a difficult time, felt like I was carrying the world on my shoulders, and knew that the ax could fall on me any day…Sterling and Al Lettieri helped me keep my morale up; They set standards and were role models for me.”

“They kept me in the film because of the scene I just played,” he added.

Pacino attended the premiere in Times Square with his then-girlfriend Jill Clayburgh, his grandmother, aunt and cousin.

“Then we went to our seats, but I didn’t see the film,” he writes. “I didn’t want to see the finished product. As soon as the lights went out, I went out.”

He left the theater and went to a bar around the corner with producer Al Ruddy and a few people who had worked on the film and the processing to get soused. That was the perfect word for it – soused – when you can’t drink anymore but you keep drinking.”

Pacino admits he didn’t see the beloved classic until it was shown in 2022 to mark its 50th anniversary.