Al Pacino (almost) died of COVID: “My heart stopped”

“You know the actors: it feels good to say that I died once!”

This is called a near-death experience. In 2020, Al Pacino contracted COVID-19. Then aged 80, he fell seriously ill and it was close to the star of Scarface Don't pass the gun to the left.

“I didn't feel well – unusually not well. I had a fever, and I was dehydrated and everything. So I asked someone to send me a nurse” tell Al Pacino in an interview with the New York Times, on the occasion of the release of his autobiography, Sonny Boy.

“One moment I was sitting at home and the next moment I had no pulse. My heart had stopped. The ambulance arrived. I had about six paramedics in my living room, and two doctors wearing these outfits that looked like they came from space. It was pretty shocking to open my eyes and see that. Everyone was around me, and they were like, 'He's back.' .”

When he thinks back to this moment when he almost died, the actor admits to feeling a strange feeling: “It really was: one moment you're there, the next you're not! Wow! And zero memories. Nothing. All that remains in memory is a strange mush.”

In another interview with PEOPLE, he tempers: “I don't think I'm dead. Everyone thought I was dead. But how could I be dead?”

Al Pacino concludes by admitting not “having seen white light or anything. There's nothing there. As Hamlet says, it's just “to be or not to be…” But you know the actors: it feels good to say that I died once !”

Let us remember thatAl Pacino is now 84 and has just had a fourth child, with his girlfriend, Noor Alfalah, aged 30.