Intimidated by an icon: the director who was “scared shitless” of Marlon Brando
As one of the greatest and most influential actors of their generation who knew they were one of the greatest and most influential actors of their generation, Marlon Brando carried a certain aura with him everywhere he went.
Even in his later years, when he became increasingly erratic and unruly, filmmakers and co-stars were willing to overlook his extensive history of mischief and unprofessionalism because he was Brando. The brightest stars tend to burn for the shortest periods of time, though, and the transformative method man was being written off as early as the 1970s.
Not just bursting onto the scene but exploding, Brando notched five Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Actor’ and one win between 1952 and 1958 alone, completely altering the landscape of screen acting in the process. A string of poor choices and bad movies saw his power wane throughout the decade, but he remained more than capable of delivering the goods when called upon.
It’s easy to look back at his performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather and call it one of the most memorable in cinema history and fully deserving of Oscars glory, but the producers didn’t want Brando anywhere near the picture to begin with. He was a has-been, a difficult presence, and someone prone to wreaking havoc, which simply wasn’t what Paramount was looking for.
He wasn’t that interested at first, either, but his audition became the stuff of legend. In a rarity for an actor of his calibre, Brando was obligated to perform a screentest to secure the part, which left director Francis Ford Coppola feeling more than a little trepidatious.
Admitting that he was “scared shitless” of coming face-to-face with his number one casting choice for the first time, a relatively unproven and inexperienced filmmaker instructing one of the best in the business how to approach a character they weren’t entirely sold on put him in a precarious predicament.
“I was thinking, How am I gonna handle this?'” Coppola admitted, per Vanity Fair. “I call up Brando. I say, ‘Mr. Brando, don’t you think it would be a good idea if we fooled around a little bit, and do a little improvisation for this role, and see what it would be like’. I didn’t say it was a screen test. I said it was like a little experiment with a video camera.”
Brando turned up, put cotton balls in his cheeks to make himself extra jowly, darkened his hair with shoe polish, slicked it back, rolled up his collar, and immediately became Vito Corleone. He probably viewed auditioning as being beneath him, given everything he’d accomplished, but by the end of his heavily-improvised screentest, there was no doubt in Coppola’s mind this was the titular godfather he’d been looking for.
