The Wild Story Behind Marlon Brando Being Cast in SUPERMAN and How He Pitched Playing Jor-El Like a Bagel

Casting Marlon Brando in the classic 1978 Superman film was a huge deal at the time! But, it was also known that working with Brando was not the easiest, as he was an extremely quirky individual. There came the point where director Richard Donner had to meet with Brando before shooting on Superman began and before meeting him, he called one of the most powerful agents and studio executives in Hollywood at the time, Jay Kanter, for some advice.

Donner said he asked him if he would give him any hints, and Kanter responded, saying: “‘He’s going to want to play it like a green suitcase.’ I said, ‘What does that mean?’ ‘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.’ I said, ‘F—,’ and then I called Francis Coppola. He said, ‘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.’”

I can only imagine what was going through Donner’s mind when he flew to California to meet with Brando. When talking about that experience of first meeting the actor, Donner said: “So I go to California and I meet Marlon F—ing Brando at his house on Mulholland Drive. Myself, Tom Mankiewicz and Ilya Salkind. He and Jack Nicholson had a little compound. We rang the gate and a couple of German shepherds came down, and there’s Marlon Brando. And it was hard to talk, because this is Marlon Brando! He invites us in and we go into his house for a drink; it was late in the afternoon and we sat down and we started to talk, and we talked and talked. Finally, it was getting dark and he said: ‘But listen, that’s not why you’re here. You’re here to talk to me about [the role].’”

It’s at this point where the conversation took an interesting turn because Brando pitched playing Jor-El as a bagel. Donner explained how that all went down and what he said to fully sell Brando on taking the role: “‘Why don’t I play this like a bagel?’ I was ready for him to say ‘a green suitcase’ and he said ‘bagel.’ He said, ‘How do we know what the people on Krypton looked like?’ He had good logic. He said, ‘Maybe they looked like bagels up there in those days?’ I said, ‘Jeez, Marlon, let me tell you something.’ He’d just told us the story about a kid [and how smart he was] and I said, ‘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 he looked at me and smiled [and said], ‘I talk too much, don’t I?’ He said, ‘OK. Show me the wardrobe.’”

You know, after hearing a lot of the stories about Marlon Brando, I sure would have loved to spend a day hanging out with him! Brando was a hero to Christopher Reeve and as you might imagine, he was extremely nervous about meeting him and working with him.

The director talked about the meeting between Reeve and Brando, saying: “He and Chris did not meet at the beginning. But they did have a scene, because I remember how nervous Chris was, working with Brando. But Brando was nice to him. He was nice to everybody. 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 dialogue on other actors’ chests. 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 Brando. He was Marlon F—ing Brando.”

And I’ll leave it at that.

Source: THR