Alicia Witt: How Quick-Thinking Al Pacino Helped Her Snap Out of a Paralyzing ‘Panic Attack’ on “88 Minutes” Set (Exclusive)

Alicia Witt; Al Pacino

Alicia Witt says costar Al Pacino taught her more in one scene “than any decades of acting classes ever could have”

Alicia Witt has Al Pacino to thank for what she calls the best lesson she’s learned as an actress.

Before working with the Oscar winner in the 2007 thriller 88 Minutes, Witt, 48, “wanted to see stuff on camera for the first time and get my real reaction to it,” she tells PEOPLE exclusively. But that all changed upon filming a scene in which she and Pacino’s characters come across a dead body.

Considering it was the first time her character, teaching assistant Kim Cummings, had seen one, Witt wanted to “just film the first take” and capture her reaction to the grisly sight. “But I was so psyched up that when I saw that dead body, my whole being went into a panic attack.”

Witt’s highly in-character and “full-on panic attack” included “sweating, shaking from head to toe, crying, hyperventilating [and] my eyes were about to black out,” she remembers. “And I'm standing there with Al and I couldn't remember any of my lines. And the cameras were rolling.”

Related: Alicia Witt Says Her Time on 'The Masked Singer' After Recovering from Breast Cancer Was 'Really Profound'

Then Pacino, now 84, playing “a forensic psychiatrist who had seen hundreds of dead bodies,” also reacted in character. “Al gave me just a couple of slaps on the cheek in exactly the way you would in a moment like that if your partner in a scene on the job like this was incapable of functioning.”

The trick worked, continues the Orange Is the New Blackactress. “I snapped out of it and I kept on going with the scene. But then we sat down and waited while they set up for the next take — and I was sitting there thinking that was a pretty amazing thing I had been able to do — and what I didn't realize in the moment was that was completely wrong for the movie.”

The Jon Avnet-directed, Gary Scott Thompson-written film follows Pacino's Dr. Jack Gramm as he receives an ominous threat that he has 88 minutes to live. Toward the end of such a pulse-pounding story, notes Witt, “you don't want to be watching Kim have a panic attack. You want to be figuring out who's trying to kill Al's character! It's got to move, it's a popcorn thriller. This wasn't some deep drama.”

Related: Al Pacino Turns 84: Inside His Life with Girlfriend Noor Alfallah, Their Child and His Busy Career

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The Godfather star “very kindly” told Witt that her emotionally dramatic reaction wasn’t necessary for this particular project, saying, “‘You don't have to do all that to yourself.’ It wasn't like he was talking down to me or lecturing me or ridiculing me. It taught me more in that moment than any decades of acting classes ever could have. And he completely and forever changed the way I think about a scene like that.”

Dipping in and out of character became much easier “from that moment on,” reports Witt. “Now I'm completely present and I think it helps the acting as well as my own self.”

Related: Maika Monroe Nearly Quit Acting After 'Some Bad' Experiences: 'It's a Very Weird Job'

Other tips for staying present in the moment, on and off screen? "Around the time that I started letting music back into my life and releasing my own music 15 years ago, that's when I started becoming more present again with my acting,” says Witt, whose most recent EP was Witness last fall and who is now working on a Christmas album.

And her dog Ernest helps, Witt says with a smile. “He's so completely in the moment and he makes me in the moment too. So any stage fright or sense of artifice I might've had through being anxious, that just vanishes.”

Witt stars alongside Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood and more in writer-director Osgood Perkins’ new horror movie Longlegs, in theaters now.

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