Al Pacino turned down an offer to play Han Solo in Star Wars because he didn’t “understand” the space opera.

The Godfather actor revealed in his 2024 memoir Sonny Boy that he turned down the role of the legendary smuggler Han Solo, who was eventually played by Harrison Ford.

Opening up his decision, Pacino joked to Entertainment Weekly, “I said, ‘I think I’m in the mood to make Harrison Ford a career.'”

He then recalled paying a visit to the offices of American Zoetrope, the production company founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas and The Godfather filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola.

“They were real idealists coming into the ’70s with great films all over the globe. So it was a wonderful place that I actually saw, I went to the building and everything before I did Godfather with them,” he continued. “So I loved their work, but I was doing a show on Broadway at the time, and they handed me this (Star Wars) script, and I thought, I don’t understand.”

Pacino, 85, explained that he took the script to his mentor and neither of them could figure out “the language” of the 1977 sci-fi.

“(I thought), I must be out of space myself,” he quipped. “But I looked at this thing and I sent it to Charlie Loughton, my friend and mentor, actually. I said, ‘What do you make of this?’ He was pretty wise and he said, ‘I don’t get it, Al. I dunno. I don’t get it.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t either; what are we going to do? They offered me a fortune, but I don’t know. No, I can’t play something if I don’t speak the language.'”

Ford went on to play Han Solo alongside Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill in all three films in the original trilogy. He reprised the role for 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, in which his character was killed off.

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