The one actor Marlon Brando considered a threat to his livelihood: “He thought I was a criminal”
In the early 1970s, Marlon Brando experienced a career resurgence thanks to his Oscar-winning turn as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather and his Oscar-nominated role in the highly controversial Last Tango in Paris. Suddenly, after a decade of being on the outs in Hollywood thanks to his difficult and often bizarre behaviour, Brando was once again revered as the greatest of all time.
It was during this period that Brando began to pay attention to the rise of another young Hollywood hellraiser whose talents were undeniable, but whose behaviour raised question marks. This star was offered the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather but turned it down as he wasn’t of Italian-American descent. Instead, he chose to make seminal counter-culture movies like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and The Last Detail, all while reportedly fueled by cocaine or high on marijuana.
This star was, of course, the legendary Jack Nicholson, and Brando was immediately wary of the prodigiously gifted, yet seemingly uncontrollable, young actor. Imagine his shock, then, when Nicholson moved in next door to him in Los Angeles. Their houses were so close, in fact, that they shared a gate, and Nicholson revealed that Brando wasn’t exactly thrilled when he first introduced himself as his new neighbour.
“At first, he thought of me as a threat to his home,” Nicholson once admitted to The Bulletin. “He was strictly against dope, and he thought I was a criminal.”
Indeed, in this era, Brando wasn’t entirely wrong. Nicholson was taking a hell of a lot of drugs back then, claiming it was a way to unlock his creativity while writing screenplays, although they certainly helped make his debauched house parties a lot more fun, too. The Chinatown star didn’t just stop at cocaine and marijuana, either. His tastes ran a lot more hallucinatory than that, and he would regularly take LSD, which biographer Marc Elliot claimed led to life-changing experiences such as believing “he had seen the face of God. He also had castration fantasies, homoerotic fantasies, and revelations about not being wanted as an infant.”
From Nicholson’s perspective, hearing that Brando was so wary of him was a real downer. After all, like most actors of his generation, he had grown up idolising the icon for his revolutionary performances. Brando was the kind of actor who quite literally changed the game and encouraged aspiring young hopefuls like Nicholson to try their hand at acting.
“When I was growing up in New Jersey, one of my summer jobs was working as an assistant manager of a local movie theatre,” Nicholson once told Rolling Stone. “I must have seen every performance of On the Waterfront, twice a night. You just couldn’t take your eyes off the guy. He was spellbinding.”
At this time, Brando may have had a reputation as an eccentric oddball who could be challenging to work with and had a penchant for mooning people on set, but none of his weird flourishes were the result of narcotics. In truth, he didn’t mess around with drugs at all. So, it’s understandable that he may have thought some drug-crazed maniac had moved in next door, and he was nervous about it.
Thankfully, Nicholson proved to Brando that taking drugs “was not my defining trait,” and after that, they became friends for the last 30 years of the ageing star’s life. “I learned he wasn’t nearly as reclusive or serious as people thought,” Nicholson mused. “We’d talk in the driveway like any other neighbours. Though I guess most neighbours don’t leave their underpants in your fridge.” Classic Brando.
