Al Pacino Revealed the Secret Behind His "Heat" Character

The films of the 1990s abounded with police officers engaged in behavior that, by all accounts, ranged from morally questionable to full-on illegal. Michael Douglas’s character in Basic Instinct should not have had an affair with a murder suspect; the cops in L.A. Confidential should not have brutalized suspects. And then there’s 1992’s Bad Lieutenant. The Michael Mann-directed film Heat isn’t spoken about in the same category as the previous three films — but based on recent comments made by star Al Pacino, maybe it should.

On a recent episode of WTF With Marc Maron, Pacino discussed the genesis of his Heat character, Vincent Hanna. As IndieWire’s Harrison Richlin reported, one detail that was crucial to Pacino’s conception of Hanna never made it to the screen: namely, Hanna’s cocaine habit.

“I don’t think I think there was a reason he had to doing it. This is a wired character I’m playing anyway,” Pacino told Maron. “But he did chip cocaine.” Pacino went on to stress that, while he had also based the character of Hanna on a real-life detective, the actual person who inspired Hanna was not a habitual cocaine user. According to Pacino, Hanna did take cocaine on-screen in one scene, but director Michael Mann cut that from the final version of Heat.

His interview with Maron wasn’t the first time that Pacino has shared this detail about his Heat performance. He also brought it up as far back as 2016, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screened the film followed by a discussion with Pacino, Mann and co-star Robert De Niro. (You might have heard of the guy who moderated that discussion, too: a filmmaker by the name of Christopher Nolan.)

As SlashFilm reported at the time, Pacino brought up Hanna’s penchant for chipping cocaine during the post-film Q & A. At the time, Mann stated that he felt that “it would attract too much attention.” Was that the correct call? It would certainly have blurred the lines between the film’s two leads more to have Hanna’s cocaine use shown on screen; still, it’s also very true that Heat has become a classic without those scenes, which suggests Mann was on to something.

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