When Marlon Brando’s imaginary friend tried (and failed) to get Martin Sheen to quit smoking
There are so many wild, weird, wonderful, and utterly bizarre stories about Marlon Brando that nothing should come as a surprise anymore. Even by his standards, though, using his imaginary friend to stage an intervention is odd.
For better or worse, there will only ever be one Marlon Brando. In front of the camera, he turned the notion of screen acting upside down, and one of the strongest cases to be made in cinema is that no performer has ever made a bigger or more monumental impact on the craft than he did.
He’s still spoken about in hushed and reverential tones by stars spanning multiple generations, many of whom are all-time greats themselves. With genius frequently comes madness, and Brando embodied that better than anyone in Hollywood when he became synonymous with wreaking behind-the-scenes havoc.
The evidence was there that he could still pull a performance out of the top drawer when he could be arsed; the problem was that he could rarely be arsed. Instead, he usually took the path of least resistance, but it speaks volumes about the chaotic production of Apocalypse Now that Brando’s imaginary friend trying to convince Martin Sheen to quit smoking doesn’t even crack the top ten.
Sheen smoked like a chimney, and Brando abhorred the habit. Naturally, when the two of them were cramped inside a houseboat with Francis Ford Coppola to rehearse and run lines, something had to give. What wasn’t natural was how the legendary actor went about it, which left his co-star completely bewildered.
“I was alone, and I’m just smoking, and Marlon went like this,” he regaled Indie London, mimicking Brando leaning toward a nonexistent person to strike up a conversation. “Excuse me, Martin, my friend here is so disturbed by your smoking. Oh, you haven’t met my friend?'”
Deciding to roll with it, Sheen introduced himself to Brando’s new buddy. “I’m talking to this imaginary guy!” he exclaimed, understandably taken aback by where The Godfather icon led the exchange. “He’s so upset about your smoking,” he was informed via words only Brando could hear. “It’s so Neanderthal. You mustn’t smoke. You’ve gotta stop it, man. He’s very concerned about your health.”
Did it work? Not quite. Sheen confessed that getting a stern talking to from Brando’s imaginary friend “almost” made him give up the habit, but he didn’t. He managed to wean himself off cigarettes for nine whole days after Apocalypse Now had wrapped production, but he wouldn’t ditch smoking for good until 2018, almost 40 years after his make-believe acquaintance had tried to stage an intervention.
It was highly unusual, but that was just Brando. “That’s how he was,” Sheen reflected. “He was so imaginative and so alive. But he was a big jokester. I mean, he loved practical jokes. He’d go out of his way to create a practical joke and stand by and laugh.”
His imaginary friend was definitely a bit, but it wasn’t a gag per se, especially when he’d done it to convey his distaste for the actor’s smoking, which doesn’t make it any less unusual.
