When Marlon Brando tried to cast himself as a sentient bagel: “That would be really original”
As one of the greatest actors of all time and arguably the single most influential in American cinema history, there are few roles Marlon Brando didn’t think he could play.
Few have ever been better than Brando when he was at the top of his game. He revolutionised the medium with his immersive embrace of the method, brought a raw naturalism and aching realism to the screen that had never been seen before, and had the acting world in the palm of his hand.
The line between genius and madness is often said to be a very thin one, and few people have captured that sentiment in Hollywood better than Brando. The longer his career wore on, the more his eccentricities came to the fore, leaving him as a living legend who was regularly more trouble than he was worth but continued to be one of the industry’s most sought-after names because of who he was.
His resurgence in the 1970s that followed The Godfather was fairly short-lived after he eventually reverted to type and started making a habit of causing hassle, and the most difficult thing about convincing Brando to play a role in a project he’d already signed up for was trying to convince him to play it.
It might sound oxymoronic, but that was kind of Brando’s deal. He’d agree to play a character and then turn up for work without learning his lines or suggest sweeping changes that barely resembled anything that had been discussed between actor and filmmaker beforehand. Richard Donner’s Superman paid him millions for what was effectively a glorified cameo, but he remained reluctant to appear in the flesh.
“Marlon’s notorious in that if he can talk you out of photographing him – let’s say, you can photograph a green suitcase – he can talk you into the fact that he should be a green suitcase,” Donner told IGN of a conversation he had with Brando’s agent. “It means that he’ll never have to go to work; you’ll photograph the green suitcase, you’ll record his voice, and he’ll get paid X millions of dollars for not going to work.”
Armed with that knowledge, Donner met with Brando to discuss Superman‘s Jor-El, where the two-time Academy Award winner pitched an even more bizarre scenario than a green suitcase. “So he says, ‘Listen, I was thinking: what if I look like a bagel?” the filmmaker explained. “I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Well, this is Krypton. Nobody knows what the people of Krypton look like.'”
Incredibly, or unsurprisingly, based on Brando’s behaviour, he even had a backstory in mind. “What if we look like bagels but I’m going to make my son look like a human because that’s where I’m sending him – to Earth – but everybody else on Krypton looks like bagels. That would be really original.”
Shockingly, Donner wasn’t sold on the prospect of Superman being descended from an alien race of sentient bagels and convinced Brando that he’d be much better off playing Jor-El as a humanoid instead of a savoury bread roll.
