The one role Marlon Brando always wanted to play: “I never got the chance to do it”
One of the easiest ways for an actor to guarantee themselves the pick of the roles is to let everyone know they’re among the best in the business, which Marlon Brando wasted little time achieving.
After cutting his teeth on the stage throughout the 1940s, Brando immediately made waves with an eye-catching performance in his feature debut, 1950’s war drama The Men. In only his second role, he earned an Academy Award nomination for A Streetcar Named Desire, and a new star was born.
That was the first of four consecutive Oscar nods for the method practitioner, who ended that run by landing the ‘Best Actor’ prize for playing Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that it might well be the single most important and influential performance in American cinema history.
From then on, everybody wanted to be Brando, apart from maybe Brando. He quickly grew disillusioned with the industry and spent most of the 1960s causing trouble behind the scenes and gradually taking the shine off his star. Of course, he was too good not to make a comeback, but even his post-Godfather renaissance was short-lived after his worst impulses kept getting the better of him.
Even when his career was experiencing one of its many lulls, Brando was still a big enough name that casting directors would love to have him involved in their projects. However, he went through his entire professional life without playing the one character he’d always dreamed of, which must have stung more when so many of his peers regarded as the all-time greats all got their chance.
Johnny Depp dropped the bombshell, revealing to Vanity Fair that Brando wanted his friend to realise the dream he never could. “Go and work on Hamlet and play that part,” he recalled being told. “Play that part before you’re too old. I thought, ‘Well, yeah, yeah, I know Hamlet’. Great. What a great part, great play, you know, this and that.” He assumed it was friendly advice, at least until the ball dropped.
“And then the killer came,” Depp explained. “He said, ‘I never did it. I never got the chance to do it. Why don’t you go and do it?’ He was the one that should have done it, and he didn’t. He didn’t. So what he was trying to tell me was: play that fucking part, man. Play that part before you’re too long in the tooth.”
Christopher Walken, Ian McKellen, Ralph Fiennes, Daniel Day-Lewis, Laurence Olivier, Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, Mel Gibson, Ethan Hawke, Christopher Plummer, and Jude Law are just some of the famous names to have played Hamlet on stage or screen. Hell, Keanu Reeves turned down Michael Mann’s Heat to do it, yet Brando never got a shot. Depp hasn’t either, though, despite his buddy’s insistence.
