Fans have been left doing a double take after Billy Zane took on the role of Marlon Brando in his new film, Waltzing With Brando.
During the late 80s and 90s, if you needed someone to play a crazy guy on a boat, Billy was your man.
In the 1989 film Dead Calm he terrorised Sam Neill and a curly-haired Nicole Kidman on their yacht out in the Pacific Ocean.
While on that slightly bigger boat in the hit 1997 movie Titanic he was a complete cad to Kate Winslet, forcing her to run off with an ultimately doomed Leonardo DiCaprio.
But while there are plenty of boats in his latest film and the chap he’s playing – one Marlon Brando – was certainly presumed to be crazy by many of his Hollywood peers.
The main takeaway of Billy’s latest role in the film Waltzing With Brando, which follows the Godfather and Apocalypse Now star as he plans to create a paradise retreat in the South Pacific in the 70s, is how astonishingly 59-year-old Zane resembles the acting legend.
Fans have been left doing a double take after Billy Zane (left) took on the role of Marlon Brando in his new film, Waltzing With Brando
The main takeaway of Billy’s role in the film, which follows the Godfather star as he plans to create a paradise retreat in the South Pacific in the 70s, is how astonishingly he resembles him
He’s already received rave reviews in the US for his performance and, says Billy now, ‘When I showed his daughter Rebecca the stills from the film, she said, ‘Is that you or Daddy?’
Little was used in the way of prosthetics – ‘just a nose bump and a wig, the rest was just me morphing into him,’ says Billy.
The film portrays Brando, who died in 2004 aged 80, in his still-beautiful 40s.
Similarly tanned and handsome as we chat over lunch near his home in Pasadena, California, Billy describes how Brando had become so disenchanted with Hollywood after making hits such as On The Waterfront that he decamped to Tetiaroa, close to Tahiti in French Polynesia, an island he bought in 1966 after filming Mutiny On The Bounty.
‘He didn’t want anything to do with Hollywood,’ says Billy, ‘but his work in Hollywood is what paid him.’
Brando’s aim was to build the world’s first ecologically perfect retreat on the island.
‘He was hemorrhaging money – hundreds of thousands; millions, likely – pouring it into research and development on technologies that we use today,’ says Billy.
Considering that this was in the late 60s and early 70s, his ideas must have sounded dotty.
Little was used in the way of prosthetics – ‘just a nose bump and a wig, the rest was just me morphing into him,’ says Billy (pictured right, this month)
He’s already received rave reviews in the US for his performance and, says Billy, ‘When I showed his daughter Rebecca (pictured) stills from the film, she said, ‘Is that you or Daddy?’
The film has a running gag where Brando attempts to turn his own urine into drinkable water (he fails) and also suggests powering the island using the voltage generated by electric eels (that didn’t come off either).
Yet some ideas, such as creating a Sea Water Air Conditioning system (SWAC) using water pumped from the depths of the ocean to cool the island, eventually did end up working and is still used to this day.
To help finance his schemes, Brando took a role in ‘some gangster picture’, which happened to be The Godfather.
Ironically, the parts he accepted simply to pay for his environmental dream (including Last Tango In Paris) ended up sparking a renaissance in his career.
Bill Fishman, who directed Waltzing With Brando, had fun re-creating some of Brando’s memorable movie scenes.
‘I had two monitors – one with the real scene from The Godfather and the other had our scene with Billy,’ he says.
‘I’d yell, ‘Action!’ and wonder why the scene wasn’t moving, only to realise I was looking at the wrong screen. Billy looked so much like Brando, I couldn’t tell the difference.’
The movie tells the story from the point of view of Bernie Judge, the upright LA architect tasked by Brando with creating his ecological paradise (played in the film by Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder).
The film portrays Brando, who died in 2004 aged 80, in his still-beautiful 40s. Brando’s aim was to build the world’s first ecologically perfect retreat in the South Pacific
The movie tells the story from the point of view of Bernie Judge, the upright LA architect tasked by Brando with creating his ecological paradise (played in the film by Jon Heder)
Bernie eventually falls under freewheeling Brando’s spell and almost wrecks his marriage in the process.
‘It was the 70s in Tahiti and Bernie was months away from home among lots of naked, gorgeous people,’ says Billy. ‘I don’t know if we can blame Marlon for that!’
The film-makers considered touching on Brando’s bisexuality, about which he was open. ‘But it didn’t really play into Bernie’s experience with Marlon,’ says Billy.
They remained pals, even though Brando eventually fired Bernie.
‘Though they were friends,’ says Billy, ‘make no mistake – it was Marlon’s show.’
Bill Fishman insists all the stories in the film are anecdotally true, including how Brando would stash thousands of dollars under his mattress, rather than use the bank (‘he was suspicious of all those capitalist institutions,’ he says).
One story that didn’t make it into the film was when Brando had guests staying at his home in Beverly Hills, and before he retired to bed he told them on no condition to talk to the gardener.
The next morning they saw a man pruning the bushes and realised the gardener was Jack Nicholson.
‘He’d come and take care of Brando’s plants,’ says Bill. ‘They were really good friends and when Brando died Nicholson bought his house because he didn’t want anyone else to have it.’
The filmmakers considered touching on Brando’s bisexuality, about which he was open. ‘But it didn’t really play into Bernie’s experience with Marlon,’ says Billy
And then, of course, there were the women.
Record producer Quincy Jones once joked that Brando would ‘sleep with a mailbox’ and the film hints at the torrid love life of the actor, who had three wives, at least 11 children and numerous lovers including Marilyn Monroe.
But it also touches upon his loneliness. ‘He was a recluse who moved to an island, yet was up all night on shortwave radio and couldn’t sleep alone,’ says Billy. ‘He was full of contradictions.’
Interestingly, having made his big screen debut as a 19-year-old in Back To The Future (where he played one of baddie Biff’s cohorts), Billy himself was touted as ‘the next Brando’.
He’s starred in a slew of hits including Titanic and Zoolander. He’s also an accomplished artist whose work sells for £75,000 a pop.
‘I’m a father of two girls [Ava, 14, and Gia, 11, who both appear in Waltzing With Brando], so I have to work a lot.’
He’s no longer with their mother, model Candice Neil, and is currently single, but has dated a procession of beautiful women including Australian actress Lisa Collins (to whom he was married for six years), Chilean actress Leonor Varela and our own Kelly Brook.
He and Kelly got engaged shortly after meeting on the 2005 film Survival Island, but they split three years later.
Interestingly, having made his big screen debut as a 19-year-old in Back To The Future (where he played one of baddie Biff’s cohorts), Billy himself was touted as ‘the next Brando’
Incidentally, Marlon’s dream of an ecologically sound resort did come to fruition in the form of The Brando, which opened its doors on Tetiaroa ten years after he died and has hosted guests such as DiCaprio and Pippa Middleton.
‘Marlon was quite possibly the godfather of the environmentalist movement,’ says Billy, ‘and of course he was vilified and accused of attention-grabbing stunts.
Today, you throw a rock and you hit an activist in Hollywood. But he used his platform for the advancement of things like environmental rights at a time when no one else was doing it.’
Waltzing With Brando is coming soon to cinemas.
