Christopher Walken’s bizarre phone call from Marlon Brando: “I hung up thinking it’s a joke”
Even though he’s far from the only acting icon to receive an unexpected phone call from Marlon Brando, Christopher Walken may have the distinction of getting the strangest one, based entirely on time and circumstance.
The first time Samuel L Jackson ever met Brando, it came by way of the legendary method man quoting his Pulp Fiction monologue. They exchanged phone numbers, but when Jackson decided to ring up the Godfather star, he was greeted by a Chinese restaurant, which Brando used as a front to screen his calls and make sure he didn’t have to talk to anyone he didn’t want to.
Spike Lee had never even met Brando before, but when his phone started ringing in the middle of the night, he answered to discover one of the greatest actors of all time wanted the incendiary filmmaker to make a movie about Native Americans. After that, the Do the Right Thing mastermind never heard from him again.
Carol Burnett revealed that she’d also been subjected to a random Brando call after he’d found out she’d had surgery on her chin and wanted to know the same of the doctor who performed it because his sister-in-law wanted to have the same procedure. She was dying for the toilet at the time, but he didn’t mind, and they continued their conversation while the comedian was perched on the porcelain throne.
Those are all very strange occurrences, but what makes Walken’s the most bizarre is that Brando was in failing health and less interested in performing than ever when the infamous oddball reached out. “I hung up thinking it’s a joke,” he admitted to The Independent. “Two minutes later, a man phoned, and when he spoke, I knew it was no joke. It was him.”
Why was Brando so desperate to speak to Walken? Well, he wanted to know the name of the choreographer the dancing machine had worked with on the 1981 musical romance Pennies from Heaven. Again, why? Because he had grand plans in mind for a highly unusual late-stage showcase.
“He said he wanted to make a musical variety show from his house,” Walken explained. “He would play the piano, and I would dance. He told me that he had lost 100 pounds by eating just Saltines and milk. I said I’d get in touch with the choreographer. I called him, and I said to him, ‘Marlon Brando wants to do a variety show’. He said, ‘What?'”
Brando had lost so much weight that he decided the best way to make use of his newly slender figure was to sit behind a piano while Walken danced in a variety special that would be filmed entirely within the actor’s home. Needless to say, it didn’t happen, and based on Brando’s track record, he probably never brought it up again.
