Why ‘The Godfather’ left Marlon Brando feeling “sick” to his stomach: “I hated it”
As impossible as it may sound, when Marlon Brando first signed up to play Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather, he was a roiling mass of insecurity and fear.
Despite changing the craft of acting forever in the 1950s and becoming the hottest star in Hollywood for the better part of two decades, by the time the early ‘70s rolled around, Brando was a shadow of his former self. He was buried in debt, battling an addiction to valium, sleepwalking into his third divorce, and, most shockingly of all, determined that he would never act again.
In truth, the man who rose to stardom projecting a raw charisma and magnetic confidence like few other stars in history was, in reality, just as riddled with self-doubt as any other actor. Perhaps this contributed to his penchant for acting out on set, which garnered him the dreaded reputation of being ‘difficult’ to work with. Whatever the case, by the end of the ‘60s, he hadn’t been in a hit movie in years, and the rave reviews he was accustomed to in the ‘50s had long fallen by the wayside.
All in all, the collapse of his personal and professional lives wreaked havoc on Brando’s mental state. “The neurotic individual’s entire self-esteem shrinks to nothing if he does not receive admiration,” he once admitted. “To be admired and to be respected is a protection against helplessness and against insignificance.” So, with the admiration he craved being frustratingly out of reach, Brando vowed that his acting days were finished.
Then, one day in January 1970, a lifeline arrived on the icon’s doorstep. It was a paperback book with a letter attached to it that read, “Dear Mr Brando, I wrote a book called The Godfather, which has had some success, and I think you’re the only actor who can play the Godfather.” The letter came from the pen of author Mario Puzo, whose book was indeed a bestseller, and he reckoned Brando was the only man with the necessary “quiet force and irony the part requires.”
At this point, though, Brando wasn’t ready to consider acting again, so he barked at his assistant Alice Marchak, “I’m not a Mafia godfather. I’m not going to glorify the Mafia,” and tossed the book aside. Undeterred, Marchak took it upon herself to read Puzo’s epic and became convinced Brando would love the part of Don Corleone, if only she could convince him to read the damn book.
So, Marchak played the long game. She began casually mentioning the name of every other actor Paramount was supposedly interested in to play Corleone, and with each name, Brando’s ears pricked up a bit more. Then, when she told him the legendary English thespian Laurence Olivier was in contention, he baulked, “He can’t play a Mafia don!” as if he, a man of Dutch, Irish, and German descent, was any more qualified to play an Italian-American.
Either way, suddenly Brando wanted the role, and so began director Francis Ford Coppola’s back-breaking process of convincing Paramount president Stanley Jaffe to hire the troubled megastar. He literally told Coppola, “As long as I’m president of the studio, Marlon Brando will not be in this picture, and I will no longer allow you to discuss it,” but somehow Coppola worked his magic, and Brando created one of the most indelible characters in cinema history. It was a thing of rare beauty, and one of those occasions where character and actor seemed destined to entwine.
Brando, though, was still incredibly self-conscious and unsure of himself, so when he first watched the movie, it didn’t exactly strike him as a classic. “When I saw The Godfather the first time, it made me sick; all I could see were my mistakes, and I hated it,” he once confessed, to the stunned disbelief of just about everyone in the movie business. Thankfully, he was able to overcome his insecurities over time, and the ‘70s saw him make a major comeback.
Maybe this finally allowed him to view The Godfather on its own merits, because years later, he saw it on TV “from a different perspective” and decided, by way of massive understatement, “it was a pretty good film.”
