The unlikely way Samuel L Jackson befriended Marlon Brando: “Get outta here”
Actors responsible for cinema’s most iconic lines of dialogue eventually get used to having their monologues quoted back at them in public, which was something Samuel L Jackson and Marlon Brando had in common.
One of them has Pulp Fiction‘s iconic Ezekiel 25:17 spiel to their name, while the other no doubt grew bored of hearing about offers being made that he couldn’t refuse after unforgettably bringing Vito Corleone to life in The Godfather.
Not that either of them were restricted to a solitary indelible soundbite, though. Whether it’s Jackson instructing everyone to hold onto their butts in Jurassic Park, waxing lyrical about the strength of the human spirit before being devoured by a shark in Deep Blue Sea, or admitting they deserved to die and hoping they’d burn in hell for it in John Grisham adaptation A Time to Kill, there’s a lot to unpack.
Brando, meanwhile, had at various points bellowed for Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire and ominously reflected on the horrors of war in Apocalypse Now. However, Jackson couldn’t have expected those two worlds to come crashing together when he encountered the influential actor for the first time.
Admitting to The Guardian that he’s used to people shouting his own lines back at him, Jackson even revealed, “That’s how I met Marlon Brando.” Clearly, the trailblazing method pioneer had enjoyed his opposite number’s delivery of Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue because he decided it was a much better introduction than the standard hello.
“I was at a benefit when this voice appeared behind me doing Ezekiel 25:17, and it was Marlon. I was just like, ‘Get outta here,'” Jackson recalled. “He gave me his phone number, and I gave him mine. From time to time, I’d get a message saying Mr Brando wants you to call him, and every time I called, it would say it was a Chinese restaurant.”
The Chinese restaurant shtick was one of Brando’s many eccentricities, one he’d use to weed out crank callers from those who actually wanted to speak to him. To screen his incoming phone calls, the Academy Award winner would instruct the person answering to pretend to be a local purveyor of authentic Eastern cuisine, which would either lead to outright confusion or the realisation that there was trickery afoot.
Nobody simply picked up, dialled, and got to speak to Brando, but at least Jackson saw through the ruse and ended up conversing with the acting heavyweight. When someone of that stature asks to be contacted on the telephone, nobody in their right mind would decline the opportunity, regardless of whether or not they ended up speaking to Brando’s team posing as a Chinese restaurant to ensure he wasn’t being bothered by the wrong people.
