“There’s Blood Everywhere:” The Wild Audition That Sealed Scarface

Michelle Pfeiffer has recently opened up about a pivotal moment in her career: during her audition for Scarface, she unintentionally injured Al Pacino, and it may have been the moment that convinced him she was right for the role of Elvira Hancock in the 1983 classic.

Appearing on the SmartLess podcast, Pfeiffer described her path to landing the part as though it were a bit of a rollercoaster. At first, director Brian De Palma was enthusiastic about casting her, but Pacino was more skeptical. She says she then buckled under pressure in the audition process, prompting De Palma to tell her, “It’s just not going to work out.”

“Al will admit this,” she said, “[but] he didn’t really want me for the part.”

The Batman Returns actress recalled meeting De Palma and the casting director and crushing her first audition for the movie. However, “over the course of two months, I just [got] worse and worse and worse, because I’m just afraid. And by the end, I’m bad.”

Pfeiffer says she doesn’t blame Pacino for his reaction. “He just was like, ‘[She’s] bad.’ And Brian finally comes to me and says, ‘You know, doll, it’s just not gonna work out. I’m like, ‘I know, man. I’m sorry.’ Because Brian really wanted me.”

“As disappointed as I was,” the Age of Innocence star continued, “I was so happy to be done with it. So, like, at least a month goes by and I get a call, they want to bring me in to screen test. So I show up and I don’t even give a shit, ’cause I know I’m not getting this part.”

To Pfeiffer’s surprise, that Scarface screen test, which she recalled was the “restaurant scene where I explode at the end,” ended up being “my best work of the film.”

But it was a bloody accident during the audition that seemed to ultimately scored her the role. “I swipe the table of the dishes and glasses break, the dishes break, cut. There’s blood everywhere. They all run over to me, to see where I’ve cut myself. Well, I didn’t cut me. I cut Al,” she recalled, adding that she “cut him in the finger or something.”

“I thought, ‘Well, there goes that part.’ [But] actually I think that was the day [Pacino] was like, ‘Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, she’s not bad.”

From then on, Pfeiffer simply was Elvira, and the rest is movie history.