Al Pacino says he ‘manhandled Madonna’ while making ‘Dick Tracy’

Al Pacino remembers working on Dick Tracy as “total bliss” because director Warren Beatty “just let you run wild.” But the Oscar winner may have run a little too wild.

In his new memoir Sonny Boy, Pacino reminisces on the making of the 1990 comic strip adaptation with utter fondness. The surreal noir parody “was a beautiful film” whose director “will always make you look better,” Pacino wrote. “I had the time of my life in that role. I danced on a table and I actually manhandled Madonna – only a little, just love taps.”

Reps for Madonna did not respond to Entertainment Weekly‘s request for comment.

Pacino plays the film’s primary villain, the slimy mob boss Alphonse “Big Boy” Caprice. Big Boy kills nightclub owner Lips Manlis (Paul Sorvino) and kidnaps his girlfriend Breathless Mahoney (Madonna), all while attempting to evade the scrutiny of detective Dick Tracy (Beatty). In Pacino and Madonna’s scenes together, “taps” are exactly what Big Boy frequently gives Breathless. But they aren’t exactly full of love.

Whether running her through a gauntlet of cabaret choreography, yanking her into a town car to escape Dick Tracy, or generally haranguing her, Pacino is constantly giving the pop superstar little bumps, taps, and tugs.

In Mike Bonifer’s Dick Tracy: The Making of the Movie, released the same year as the film, Madonna recalled Pacino’s Method training taking over at times. “Whenever Al put his prosthetics on, his suit,” she said (via Page Six), “he was always smacking my butt and my face… and so what happened off camera was that I’d always try to be moving away from him. He’d always grab me and go, ‘Get over here!’ which is exactly what happened in the movie.”

Though Madonna expressed that she “hated” Pacino while in he was in character, saying “I loathed him, I was disgusted with him,” she also described the man behind the mask as “well-mannered and gentlemanly” in real life.

“Dick Tracy was wonderful,” Pacino wrote in Sonny Boy. Working on the film enabled the Dog Day Afternoon actor to feel “a renewed appetite to engage my imagination and create a character that had a real identity.”

He expanded, “I had my own idea of this guy. They called him Big Boy because he had elephantiasis. Parts of him were swollen to an outrageous degree. Oversize hands. A jutting chin. A bulbous nose. The makeup artist John Caglione Jr. and I played with all these designs that we’d show to Warren.”

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Pacino even recalled that he “got really grotesque at one point and Warren got me to dial it back a little.”

Ever committed to his roles, Pacino threw himself into the glowering and contemplative mob boss Michael Corleone in The Godfather as he did the wacky, tap-dancing mafioso in Dick Tracy. He called the film his “brief stint in comedy,” though he’d go on to act in all-out comedies like Stand Up Guys, Jack and Jill, and The Humbling later in his career.

“This was still the dawn of the era of comic-book and comic-strip characters getting turned into movies,” Pacino wrote, reflecting Marvel and DC’s industry takeover some two decades later. Dick Tracy, however, “had wit and sophistication… and it got me an Oscar nomination – my first in more than a decade.”

Fittingly, Pacino would lose to the Best Supporting Actor trophy that year to Joe Pesci, who played a real gangster in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.

Sonny Boy is out now.