Michelle Pfeiffer lived on ‘tomato soup and Marlboros’ during ‘Scarface’ shoot

April 20 (UPI) — Actress Michelle Pfeiffer said she was “starving” by the time she finished her role as an emaciated cocaine addict in the 1983 gangster film Scarface.

Pfeiffer and her co-stars Al Pacino and Steven Bauer reunited with their director Brian De Palma for a Tribeca Film Festival panel discussion Thursday night at the Beacon Theatre in New York.

Asked about the painfully frail-looking frame she maintained during the movie’s six-month shoot, EW.com reported the 59-year-old actress replied: “I was starving by the end of it. … I literally had members of the crew bringing me bagels because they were all worried about me and how thin I was getting. I think I was living on tomato soup and Marlboros.”

Pacino, 77, said the movie itself was always meant to be over-the-top in its portrayal of decadence and violence.

“Bombast was part of what we were trying to say with the movie,” Deadline quoted Pacino as saying. “It was bigger than life.”

“I thought that we had to show that these were different kinds of gangsters,” said De Palma, 77. “I thought, ‘Right at the beginning, let’s show the kind of violence we’re going to be dealing with.’”