There’s a reason Marlon Brando ranks as one of the all-time-great actors. Across his career, he embodied so many legendary characters – sometimes he disappeared into them, other times the characters seemed to mould themselves over Brando’s own physicality and persona. You never knew quite what you’d get from him; his presence and his voice work always gave his performances a dimension of the unexpected. It’s a lot, then, for another actor to try and get under Brando’s skin – which was the task of Billy Zane, who looks near-indistinguishable from the man himself in Waltzing With Brando.
The film, from director Bill Fishman, follows Brando in the 1970s in Tahiti, as he tries to construct a beautiful, eco-friendly home with the help of architect Bernard Judge (Jon Heder). For Zane, his approach to playing Brando was to do so “counter-intuitively,” he tells Empire in The Running Man issue. “Which was to do it as if he would have done it, which was to not give a shit. I had to just be in his headspace,” he explains. If that sounds nonchalant, there’s an undeniable specificity to the way Zane recreates moments from The Godfather, Superman, and Apocalypse Now. “It was such a beautiful and collaborative effort that painted those moments and the meticulous task of those recreations,” he says, a process which meant going “frame by frame, breath by breath”.
The result sees Zane pay tribute to – yes – an on-screen all-timer, but also one of his personal acting heroes. “My favourite cocktail is chaos plus talent,” he says of Brando’s work. Anyone for a drink?
Read Empire’s full Waltzing With Brando story in The Running Man issue, on sale now. Order a copy online here. Waltzing With Brando is currently awaiting a UK release date.
