Al Pacino admits in his new memoir Sonny Boy (via Page Six) that he didn’t take a paycheck for his most controversial film. William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) starred Pacino as a New York cop who goes undercover in the city’s gay leather scene to catch a serial killer preying upon the subculture.

I didn’t want to make it a p.r. stunt,” he explained. “I just wanted one positive thing to come out of that whole experience.”

In his new memoir Sonny Boy, Al Pacino says that he donated his salary from the controversial 1980 film Cruising to charity after he found the finished product “exploitative” of the LGBTQ+ community.