Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Watching Al Pacino in his prime must have been a quasi-religious experience.
When he burst onto the scene in the 1970s, he took the acting world by storm, and these performances are still held in the highest regard and are studied and dissected by countless students attempting to recapture some of that magic, but unfortunately, time has not been kind to our friend Alfredo.
In recent years, Pacino has done everything in his power to ruin his reputation; there’s his ill-fated turn in Jack and Jill, which he only made because he ran out of money, and in 2025, he appeared in five different movies, with only one of them doing well among the critics. His fall from grace has been difficult to watch or digest, but one of his most controversial roles of recent times was actually on the small screen.
Pacino starred in the Amazon Prime series Hunters, which premiered in 2020, centring on the discovery of a secret Nazi society planning to launch a Fourth Reich in the 1970s, with the titular ‘Hunters’ tasked with tracking these members down to stop their sinister plan, because…well, if you need me to explain why it’s sinister, then I can’t help you.
Pacino’s involvement in the show drew criticism from a range of commentators, as his character, Meyer Offerman, is Jewish, while the actor is not, thereby sparking claims of cultural appropriation and anti-Semitism. This subject came up during an interview Pacino gave to The Times, but rather than apologise for the upset he caused, the Oscar-winning legend doubled down on his casting and tried to justify it in his own unique way.
“I have no problem with this,” he simply said, “Maybe more in films because it’s more literal or more naturalistic, but if you play the oboe, you play the oboe. It doesn’t matter what you are, you’re in the orchestra, you’re doing the thing, you’re playing the music. [Here] you’re playing the playwright.”
The issue of actors playing characters of different ethnicities or religious backgrounds from themselves is nothing new, as three years after Hunters‘ premiere, Helen Mirren was slammed for playing former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, despite not being Jewish. Bradley Cooper’s decision to don a prosthetic nose to play Jewish composer Leonard Bernstein was met with similar outrage, with some comparing it to wearing Blackface.
One Jewish person who defended Pacino’s casting was his co-star, Logan Lerman, who declared, “That’s bullshit. As a Jewish person, I can say that. Come on, anybody can play the role”. However, it’s important to remember that one member does not speak for an entire community and that Logan had a vested interest in the controversy going away.
The depiction of minority groups onscreen is a constantly evolving topic; while it’s true that acting is inherently based on falsehoods, when it comes to stories about events so central to a culture’s mythology, it’s probably a good idea to let the people affected by it tell it themselves. As a non-Jewish person myself, if this has intrigued you, I encourage you to seek out more informed opinions on this subject.
