Al Pacino Details Near-Death Experience: He ‘Didn’t Have a Pulse’ During COVID Battle

Al Pacino had a close call during a 2020 bout with COVID-19, saying in a new interview that at one point he didn’t have a pulse.

“What happened was, I felt not good — unusually not good,” the Scarface actor told The New York Times Magazine. “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.”

Luckily for Pacino, medical help arrived within a matter of minutes. “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,” he recalled. “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.’”

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He went on: “They said 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.”

Pacino also said he saw nothing during that near-death experience. “I didn’t see the white light or anything,” he revealed. “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?”

Having lived to tell the tale, the Academy Award-winning Scent of a Woman star has a slate of films coming soon, including the biopic film Modì – Three Days on the Wing of Madness, directed by Johnny Depp and due for release in Italy this December. He’ll also star in the drama film Hand of Dante, the Shakespeare adaptation Lear Rex, and the horror film The Ritual.