Bare bums, Osama bin Laden, male models, and jazz: the only time Marlon Brando taught an acting class
When the actor regarded by many of his peers as the greatest of all time revealed that he was teaching an acting class for the first and only time in his life, it’s understandable that it immediately became one of the hottest tickets in town, but this being late-stage Marlon Brando, though, meant it was also batshit insane.
Why did the two-time Academy Award winner who single-handedly reshaped the profession in his own image decide that he wanted to pass on wisdom to those who followed in his wake? Simply because his original plan to sell earthquake-proof houses and drill-assisted air conditioners on QVC didn’t materialise, and he needed a way to make money fast.
That was genuinely the catalyst behind the once-in-a-lifetime event, with Brando hosting a ten-day workshop in a rented house that included Robin Williams, Sean Penn, Whoopi Goldberg, Edward James Olmos, and Leonardo DiCaprio among its attendees, as well as guest appearances from Michael Jackson and Philippe Petit, the guy who crossed the distance between the Twin Towers on a tightrope.
According to those who were there, the classes looked unlike anything you could imagine. Brando began the extended seminar, titled Lying for a Living, by delivering an improvised ten-minute monologue while wearing a blonde wig, blue mascara, false eyelashes, and a black ballgown, tastefully paired with an orange scarf, before mooning the gathered crowd at the end, and things only skewed weirder from then on.
At various points, Brando had Samoan wrestlers and little people perform improv exercises onstage, once dragging a homeless guy off the street and in for acting lessons. He also ordered his students to strip naked in front of everyone, hired a jazz musician to play his favourite songs on the piano, and while all of this was going on, he had Williams do a 30-minute session about selling a used car opposite a real used car salesman.
American History X director Tony Kaye was there, and he naturally thought it was a good idea to show up for his first day dressed as Osama bin Laden in November 2001, which offended Jon Voight so much that he wanted to leave but was convinced to stay when Brando ordered the filmmaker to change into something much less controversial.
Tony Ward, a male model who’d enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame as part of Madonna’s inner circle in the 1990s, once called the entire thing “a circus”, at which point Brando eloquently told him to fuck off, and while all of this sounds like the eccentric and self-indulgent performative ramblings of a madman, Olmos had a slightly different insight to offer.
“Was he serious about the class? As serious as a heart attack,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “Brando had never taught an acting class before; this was the only time in his whole life. This was going to be his legacy to the acting community.” It sounds like the most insane acting school in history, and the entire thing was captured on film; however, nobody’s ever seen it, and nobody ever will, with the stories swirling around like a haunting presence.
When the icon passed away in 2004, his friend and film producer, Mike Medavoy, was named as the executor of his estate, who claimed that there are hundreds of hours of footage, but “they’re under lock and key”, adding, “We’re not going to sell them, we’re not going to rent them. There’s no reason to do it”. ‘Lying for a Living’ might be hidden away, but if it wasn’t caught on tape, you’d never believe it was real.
