Mohar Basu (MID-DAY; October 17, 2019)

As Ali Fazal turned a year older on October 15, he marked the occasion with an intimate dinner with Death On The Nile co-stars Gal Gadot and Annette Bening in London. Interestingly, the actor jokes that he received his birthday gift a day earlier — Fazal, who was attending the London Film Festival, met his screen idol Al Pacino at the screening of The Irishman.

"It has been a lifelong journey to finally arrive at this moment when I got to meet the man himself," enthuses Fazal. The actor says that he grew up on a steady diet of Pacino’s classics, including The Godfather series and Scarface (1983). He further reveals that he harboured the dream of meeting the legend since his college days.

"My friends Vijay and Aalaap, and I used to fill up the walls of our hostel room with posters of the movies that we would like to watch. Over the years, I watched each and every film on that list. And that day, I could not believe that I was meeting those very actors whom I had seen while growing up."

During his interaction with the Hollywood superstar, Fazal told Pacino how his mother — an avid fan of the legend — had narrated the story of The Godfather to him as a fairytale.