The reason Jack Nicholson had a “big problem” working with Marlon Brando
Throughout his career, Jack Nicholson has been fortunate enough to work with just about any actor he would have desired to star alongside. After all, Nicholson has been one of the most bankable stars out there for countless decades, so anyone in their right mind would say yes to featuring in a film with him.
At one point, though, Nicholson was the new kid on the block and there was a moment in time in which it was he that was looking up to the great actors who came before him. Fortunately enough for the New Jersey-born actor, Nicholson had once starred alongside the legendary and inimitable Marlon Brando.
The film in question, The Missouri Breaks, arrived in 1976 and saw two heavyweights of different eras of American cinema come together with the likes of Randy Quaid, Harry Dean Stanton and Kathleen Lloyd in tow. Narratively, Arthur Penn’s movie focuses on themes of the American frontier, and the economic exploitation of the time, particularly in a rugged area of north-central Montana.
Nicholson played down and out rustler, while Brando portrayed a regulator hired to sort him out for a land baron. At the time, Nicholson had already come to the fore with a number of impressive performances in the likes of Easy Rider, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Five Easy Piece, but acting with Brando for the first time was still something that seemed to blow him away.
“It’s a big problem,” Nicholson had once said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “I suddenly felt myself feeling an old symptom while working with Marlon, which is that he’s so powerful, you fall so in love with what he’s doing that you want to do it yourself. I studied him then, and I find myself now, even when I’m working with him, wanting to emulate him.”
Indeed, Brando’s pulling power as an actor was undoubted, and he was frequently stated as being one of the greatest actors of all time. Even someone like Nicholson, who had begun to carve out an impressive legacy for himself by the mid-1970s, couldn’t help but be entranced by the On the Waterfront and The Godfather actor.
Nicholson went on to explain how when he had first set out to achieve fame in Hollywood, he found that there were several actors who merely wanted to imitate the great actors who had gone before, which meant that Nicholson himself decided to try and do things somewhat different and create his own style of performing.
“In other words, when I first came to L.A., there were ten or 12 James Dean-types, innumerable Marlon Brando-types,” Nicholson said. “No telling how many people were trying to emulate his timing, his style. I made a very conscious choice not to do that, even though I might feel in my heart that Marlon and I were true soul brothers. It’s a well-beaten path, do you know what I mean?”
“I think there’s a well-known contest in the acting profession to see who can say the best stuff about Marlon,” Nicholson added. Evidently, there was a huge thing about Marlon Brando at the time (as there still is today), but Jack Nicholson knew that he was fortunate enough to act with him in a movie and wasn’t going to blow his chance by merely imitating him as so many others had tried to do.
