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Chris O'Donnell was so convinced he had blown his screen test for Scent of a Woman that he snubbed its star, Al Pacino, when they later shared an elevator. ''I pretended I didn't recognize him because I was so bummed out that I hadn't done well,'' recalls the 21-year-old actor, who didn't blow a thing: He snagged the role of Charlie Simms, the inexperienced caretaker hired to look after a blind, retired Army colonel-Pacino-in Martin Brest's comedy-drama, due this fall. Growing up in Winnetka, Ill., O'Donnell appeared in a few TV commercials before making an impressive screen debut two years ago as Jessica Lange's edgy older son in Men Don't Leave. Since then he has put in a few years at Boston College (he's taking a break now), where his acting gigs were pretty much limited to delivering ''a few good lines in the local bars.'' But O'Donnell makes a great Southern heartbreaker in Fried Green Tomatoes, and he appears this fall in Scent as well as in School Ties, a drama about anti- Semitism in the 1950s. He's not sure what film he'll do next, but after the opportunity to make out with Joan Cusack in Men Don't Leave and Mary-Louise Parker in Fried Green Tomatoes, he does have one request: more women. ''Working with Pacino's awesome, but there are no girls in this movie,'' he says.


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Posted Jan 31, 1992 | Published in issue #103 Jan 31, 1992 | Order Article Reprints