In a new interview, Al Pacino has revealed that he nearly died of COVID-19 in 2020, and said the experience left him with some new insight into what happens after we die.
In a conversation with the New York Times’ The Interview podcast, Pacino, 84, detailed his battle with the disease and said he “felt not good — unusually not good” when paramedics arrived at his home in the early days of the pandemic.
“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,” Pacino explained during a chat to promote his coming memoir, Sonny Boy.
“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 father of four recounted.
But the Godfather star said that his brush with death didn’t leave him with any “metaphysical ripples.”
“It was so — you’re here, you’re not. I thought: ‘Wow, you don’t even have your memories. You have nothing.’ Strange porridge,” he said.
“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 traveller 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?”
Pacino said his vast filmography and his children were offered some “consolation” for the prospect that there’s nothing after death.
“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,” the Heat star said.
But in a separate interview with PEOPLE, Pacino said he was left confused by the ordeal of nearly dying. “I looked around and I thought, ‘What happened to me?’” he recalled.
The Oscar winner also questioned whether he actually died.
“I thought I experienced death. I might not have. I don’t think I have, really. I know I made it,” he said. “I don’t think I died. Everybody thought I was dead. How could I be dead? If I was dead, I fainted. And when I opened my eyes, there were six paramedics in my living room. There was an ambulance outside the door, and two of my doctors in those space suits (like) on Mars. I looked around and I thought, ‘What happened to me?’
“So I couldn’t have died, because how did all those people gather together, the ambulance in front of my house?”
Asked if the experience changed how he looks at his life, Pacino told PEOPLE, “Not at all.”