Four years after contracting COVID-19 during the 2020 pandemic, Al Pacino says he almost died from the virus—and that those awaiting a great “white light” may be in for disappointment.
Speaking to The New York Times to promote his upcoming memoir, Sonny Boy, Pacino said that his infection with COVID led to severe dehydration. “My pulse was gone. It was so—you’re here, you’re not. I thought: Wow, you don’t even have your memories. You have nothing. Strange porridge.”
The 84-year-old Oscar winner added that after feeling “unusually not good” and sustaining a fever, “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,” he continued. “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.’”
Did Pacino feel any “metaphysical ripples” during his near-death experience? Nope: “I didn’t see the white light or anything. 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.”
The Godfather actor then admitted his flair for the dramatic may have led him to embellish his account. “But you know actors: It sounds good to say I died once,” he told the Times. “What is it when there’s no more?”
Pacino recounted a similar story over the weekend to People, who asked the actor if the near-death event had changed how he lives his life. “Not at all,” said the father of four, whose youngest child, Roman, was born in June 2023. Pacino welcomed his son with 30-year-old girlfriend Noor Alfallah; over the weekend, Alfallah was photographed leaving the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles alongside Bill Maher hours after dining with Pacino, as reported by Page Six. (Vanity Fair has reached out Alfallah and Maher for comment.)
What, one may wonder, does the late-night comedian who once made a film about religion have to say about the afterlife? “I believe in the doctrine of I Don’t Know,” Maher told NPR back in 2008. “To say ‘I don’t know’ about the afterlife is the only reasonable, and also humble, opinion you can hold.”
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