Why Robert Duvall Passed on ‘The Godfather Part III’—and Had No Regrets

Hollywood lost one of its acting giants over the weekend with the announcement that Robert Duvall has died at the age of 95. The legendary thespian leaves behind an iconic career of storied performances—and no regrets about deciding to step away from the role of consigliere Tom Hagen in The Godfatherseries.

The self-described “Navy brat” grew up mostly in Annapolis, Maryland, and came from a long line of military careerists, and was even a descendant of Confederate General Robert E. Lee—whom he portrayed in the 2003 Civil War epic, Gods and Generals. 

In a 1977 interview with People, Duvall stated that his father—a Navy Admiral—had anticipated that his son would follow in his footsteps. Instead, he spent a year in the U.S. Army immediately following the Korean War. But even as a youngster, Duvall knew that his only desire was to be an actor: “I was terrible at everything but acting,” he said. “I could barely get through school.”

Eventually, and with his parents’ blessing, Duvall made his way to New York City’s Neighborhood Playhouse, where esteemed acting teacher Sanford Meisner described Duvall as one of the most gifted actors he ever had the pleasure of working with. (The late Gene Hackman was his roommate for a time.)

By the early 1960s, Duvall started landing regular roles on TV—and in 1962 he memorably starred as Boo Radley in Robert Mulligan’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. While he maintained a steady lineup of roles on both television and in film, including True Grit, M*A*S*H, Duvall’s breakthrough role came at the age of 41 years old, when he played Tom Hagen, the adopted son and consigliere to Marlon Brando’s unforgettable mafia boss Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. 

It didn’t take long for Duvall, who earned his first of seven Oscar nominations for the role (he won only once, for Best Actor in Tender Mercies) to realize that that movie was going to make a huge impact. 

“All I know is about a third of the way through Godfather, and before I knew it, we had something special,” Duvall later said of the film. “And I only felt that twice, but very special and turned out to be true, you know? And I gained a lot of respect for Coppola because he had to work. We thought maybe he was going to be fired because he was working under the pressure of the studio, who maybe saw the outcome of the film in a different way than he did. But he did it the way he wanted to. And he adhered to those concepts of his, and the film turned out to be what he wanted. He was the boss.”

While he happily returned to reprise the role in The Godfather’s 1974 sequel, its long-awaited—and, eventually, much-maligned—third film was a different story. 

When it was announced that Duvall would not be reprising his role, the actor told Parade Magazine that he was not returning because the producers were “cheap.”

“There are two or three other actors in that film being paid more than I was offered. That just isn’t right,” he said. Still, Duvall said he had no regrets about saying no, because it was about the principle. 

In 2004, he spoke to CBS about his decision to walk away from Hagen, and how the pay disparity left him no other choice. 

The film’s star, Al Pacino, was reportedly paid $8 million for his role. “I said I would work easily if they paid Pacino twice what they paid me, that’s fine. But not three or four times, which is what they did.”

He added how Coppola “came to my farm, parked his car, came to my farm, we went in the kitchen. He said, ‘I know you always wanted the crab cake recipe, let me cook it for you. Oh he loves to eat so I cooked the crab cake, and he wrote it down, and he forgot it. So he called twice. He was more concerned that he forgot the crab cake recipe than would I be in Godfather III.”

In 2022, Duvall told The A.V. Club that there were no hard feelings between the two about the decision. “[W]e stayed friends and he helped me with the editing of certain things I did,” said the actor-turned-director, who is best known for 1997’s Oscar-nominated The Apostle. 

“I haven’t talked to him much lately,” Duvall admitted at the time, “but for a while there we talked a lot and conversed a lot definitely after that. Definitely, definitely. I visited his vineyard and him and so forth. He’s an interesting guy, interesting guy.”