Christopher Reeve Didn’t Like Working With Marlon Brando

Superman was a big deal, more so than viewers of today’s superhero flicks might think. It was the first time that a lot of money had been spent bringing a hero from comic books to the silver screen. The special effects were ahead of their time, and the feel of the movie was substantial.

Handling what at the time was a complicated production was director Richard Donner. He’d come from successfully making The Omen, a big hit from 1976. But it hadn’t been clear to Donner what he’d do next until he was asked to take on Superman. He hadn’t needed asking twice. Nor had his star, Christopher Reeve.

Reeve wasn’t then a big name or even really known at all, outside of the theater. In that realm, he already had a career. But this was his big break in films. Landing the movie role even surprised his father, who asked whether what the director wanted him for was Man and Superman, a well-known play.

But no, Reeve was being hired to play the hulking hero of an action movie. One problem faced the actor. At 6’4”, he was tall enough, but he wasn’t a big dude. He needed to get some muscle onto his frame. With typical application, he threw himself into training. And despite not being familiar with comic books, he immersed himself in the character too.

Alongside Reeve would be Brando, playing his dad Jor-El. But they wouldn’t appear on screen together: Brando exits fairly early, passing before Reeve enters the film. He does leave behind a slew of video messages, which mean that Brando’s short time in the movie is extended because the viewer also gets to watch them.

For the role of Superman’s dad, Brando raked in a small fortune. He was paid $3.7 million, which is equivalent to not far short of $16 million at the time of writing. And he also scored 11.75 percent of the film’s profits, which turned out to be a decent sum of money given the movie’s success. Not bad for a couple weeks of work, is it?

In fact, that might be the most expensive performance ever in terms of dollars per minute! Because Brando is only on-screen for fewer than 20 minutes. Compare that with Reeve, who shows up for much of the film’s two hours-plus. And Reeve’s haul? A mere $250,000: not bad for the time, but not Brando money!

Donner wasn’t amused at first by the cost of Brando. He said in a making-of feature, “When I first came on the picture and I heard how much Marlon Brando was paid for it, I was really upset, because it seemed like much more money than anyone is worth,” It turned out, though, that Donner came to believe Brando was worth it. He continued, “But then working with him and seeing him on film, to me, he is underpaid.”

Why give Brando such a massive fee for so little work? Well, the production team had to sign up a big name if they hoped to get anyone to finance the movie. As we noted, this was the first big superhero film, and this was even before Star Wars. Possibly no one would have fronted the cash for it without a superstar being attached.

Brando himself had no qualms about it, as he remembered in the feature. He said, “Everything has a price in the marketplace, so do cars, so do hula hoops, so do useless endeavors. And I don’t suppose actors are any different than rock bands.” And Brando’s price was huge given his fame.

And that fame was pretty much at its peak, after some huge success in the 1970s. Brando had wowed audiences with stellar performances in the risqué classic Last Tango in Paris and gangster epic The Godfather. The latter had bagged him an Oscar, although he’d created headlines by refusing to collect it in protest against the treatment of Native Americans.

Brando had been a big name for some time before that, though. Renowned as a method actor, he’d begun his professional life on the stage, where he’d quickly caught Hollywood’s eye. He didn’t fancy working on the silver screen, though: by all accounts he was reluctant to get tied down by a long-term contract.

Even so, Brando couldn’t resist Hollywood forever, and he showed up in 1950’s The Men as a paraplegic vet. The next year he took the part of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, in which he’d starred on Broadway. That gained him a nod from the Academy, which also nominated him for his next two films, Viva Zapata! and Julius Caesar.

By 1955 Brando was riding high, and his part as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront finally brought him the coveted Oscar. Brimming with confidence, Brando was adding extra value to his movies even while dancing to his own tune. He improvised a scene with Eva Marie Saint, which was so effective that Elia Kazan, the film’s director, retained it.

But with the world seemingly at his feet, the fame train seemed to slow down for Brando in the 1960s. His performances dropped off in quality, and he seemed uninterested in the business of film-making. He was much more heavily engaged in political activity. All that would change, though, in 1972 when Francis Ford Coppola hired him for The Godfather.

The studio really didn’t want Brando, who by this time had acquired a reputation for being difficult. But it relented, on certain conditions. Brando would have to do a screen test, he’d be paid peanuts, and he’d have to put up a bond of $1 million to compensate the studio if he “cause[d] trouble” during the making of the movie.

In the screen test, Brando put all doubts to rest. He completely inhabited the role of Vito Corleone. To acquire the tone of the part, he popped cotton balls into his mouth, and to get the look perfect, he rolled his mane up in a bun and colored his hair with black shoe polish. Coppola was astonished at the change.

Famously, Brando did not learn his lines for The Godfather, or for any of his later films. In one scene, he read them from a card stuck to a co-star’s chest. In Superman, it’s whispered, he had his lines written on a kid’s diaper. He went one further in Last Tango in Paris, putting some of his words on his nude counterpart’s body.

In Superman Brando did his scenes with enormous cue cards. There was talk that Brando was lazy and couldn’t be bothered with learning his lines. But he rebuffed that idea. He claimed that by using the cards, he could present his dialog with a natural feel and not sound over-rehearsed.

Brando’s approach to his lines was the least of Donner’s problems during the film. His big trouble, he later told magazine The Hollywood Reporter, had been the producers. They had been obsessed with money, the director claimed. So the maestro found himself in a battle over the budget, the final size of which he claimed had never been made explicit.

Donner told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016, “They kept saying, ‘You’re going over budget.’ And I would say, ‘How am I going over budget if I don’t know what the budget is?’ It got to the point where I just told them, ‘Don’t come on to set. You’re counterproductive.’ And it became us against them. They were against the quality of the movie.” 

Whatever the Salkinds had aimed at, the film ended up costing about $55 million – but it proved to be money well spent. It raked in $300 million at the box office, and the reviews it received then and afterwards have been stellar. At 94 percent fresh on movie ranking website Rotten Tomatoes, it’s fair to say that the critics loved it.

So there’s no doubting the movie’s success, and it catapulted Reeve from unknown to star. But in 1982 on The Late Show with David Letterman, when the chat show host asked him about working with Brando, the reply wasn’t positive. In the interview, Reeve says, “I don’t say this to be vicious, but I don’t worship at the altar of Marlon Brando.”

But why would Reeve feel that way? Surely, it had been a treat to work with such a star? No. He continues, “Because I feel he’s copped out in a certain way. He’s no longer in a leadership position that he could be. He could really be inspiring a whole generation of actors by continuing to work.”

Ouch! But Reeve wasn’t finished in his dissection of Brando, as he continues to savage the star. He says, “But what happened is the press loved him whether he was good, bad or indifferent. Where people thought he was this institution no matter what he did. So he doesn’t care anymore.”

As Reeve is sharing these thoughts on working with the star of The Godfather, he remains calm, his voice level. It seems that he is just telling the facts as he sees them. He adds, “And I think it would just be sad to be 53 or whatever he is and not give a damn. I just think it’s too bad that the man has been forced into that hostility.”

But even though Reeve presents an urbane and decent front, the tension on the stage is noticeable. Letterman clearly decides to break it down. He teases Reeve by saying, “Well, he’s here tonight, Chris.” The audience loves the interjection, erupting into laughter at the thought, because of course it isn’t true.

Reeve remains a model of decency, though, although the notion obviously leaves him a little flustered. He tells Letterman that he would give the same review to Brando’s face. He says, “I don’t care. That’s something that I would say to him as well. I wouldn’t want to be accused of talking out of school.”

But even if Reeve hadn’t found Brando an inspiration as he might have hoped, perhaps he found it exciting to get a gig with him? When asked about this, Reeve denies it flatly. He says, “Not really. No. I had a wonderful time, but the man didn’t care. He just took the $2 million and ran.”

Why did it all matter so much to Reeve? He explains to Letterman, “I just care. I’m still a real beginner, and I care so much that it hurts when someone’s phoning it in. He’s a wonderful actor. He’s a brilliant man. But at this moment he just isn’t motivated.” 

So Reeve had not been impressed by Brando. But what were other people’s impressions of the A-lister at that time? Director Donner had a view that he shared with The Hollywood Reporter. He described his first meeting with the legend. He had asked agent Jay Kanter what to expect. And Kanter had told him, “He’s going to want to play it like a green suitcase.”

Now when Donner asked what that could mean, Kanter had replied, “It means he hates to work and he loves money, so if he can talk you into the fact that the people on Krypton look like green suitcases, and you only photograph green suitcases, he’ll get paid just to do the voiceover. That’s the way his mind works.”

Well, that does seem to dovetail with what Reeve said about the legend. But Donner wasn’t willing to be taken in by it, so he approached Francis Ford Coppola, the director of The Godfather. His fellow movie-maker said of Brando, “He’s brilliant. He’s got a brilliant mind. But he loves to talk. Keep him talking, and he’ll talk himself out of any problem.”

So Donner went to his meeting, fully expecting Brando to want to play a green suitcase. And he wasn’t wrong to be prepared for some trickery. But it wasn’t suitcases; instead, the star said, “Bagel.” He described the people of Krypton as possibly resembling bagels, saying, “Maybe they looked like bagels up there in those days?”

Donner’s preparation paid off, though. He told the star, “Jeez, Marlon, let me tell you something… It’s 1939. There isn’t a kid in the world that doesn’t know what Jor-El looks like, and he looks like Marlon Brando.” And with that, the problem was resolved. Jor-El would indeed look like Brando. 

And perhaps Donner would have been a bit taken aback by Reeve’s comments, given that he believed that he’d admired Brando. The director told The Hollywood Reporter, “They had dinner; he was Chris’ hero. He was a doll. He was totally present, on time. Not difficult, [though] we had to put his dialog on other actors’ chests.”

Donner explained, “He would say, ‘I don’t want to read it like I’ve read it before a bunch of times. The first time I read it, it’ll be honest.’ He made it work. He was the ultimate. He was Marlon.” So the director did not quite agree with Reeve’s assessment. Others, though, very much did.

When Brando starred in The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1996, he was no fun to work with at all. Screenwriter Ron Hutchinson wrote of the experience in his memoir, Clinging to the Iceberg: Writing for a Living on the Stage and in Hollywood. In it, he revealed, “By this stage of his life Brando… was way beyond bored with the making of movies. Overweight, unprepared, mocking, dismissive, on the razor’s edge where caprice becomes malice… He was indeed here to sabotage this movie.”

Hutchinson added, “Brando placed a kitchen colander on his head, slathered himself in sunscreen, fell in love with Nelson [his dwarf co-star], retired to his trailer and refused to leave it.” So it seems that Reeve was by no means the only person to find working with Brando an experience that wasn’t enjoyable.