Robert Duvall reveals Marlon Brando’s secret in The Godfather: ‘Everything that’s said about him is true’
Robert Duvall, who played Tom Hagen in the iconic movie, revealed what it was like to work with Brando on the set.
The production of The Godfather is full of legendary Hollywood stories, many of which centered on the legendary Marlon Brando.
The iconic actor has inspired countless anecdotes and was notorious for his eccentric on-set habits. Chief among them his rumored refusal to memorize lines. For decades, rumors circulated that Brando scattered notes around the set to read from during scenes, a claim that his The Godfather co-star Robert Duvall addressed directly.
“Absolutely, everything that’s said about him is true. He had his lines hanging on a tree when he had that scene with Pacino in the garden, and he was lying down,” Duvall revealed. “Then he had his lines here, we took them and put them on one of the wedding invitations, then we had to cut them up, and so on.”
The Godfather was not the only production where Brando relied on this method. On the set of Superman (1978), where he played Jor-El, the Krypton scenery was famously covered with cue papers. By then, Brando’s reputation for avoiding memorization was so established that Francis Ford Coppola worried other actors might imitate him. James Caan - who played the fiery Sonny Corleone - did occasionally improvise, but thankfully for Coppola, he still delivered his scripted lines faithfully.
The cast of Coppola’s iconic trilogy was stacked with stars - Brando, Pacino, De Niro, Duvall, Caan - but it almost included another future legend who, at the time, was an unknown actor with no credits. Years before writing Rocky, Sylvester Stallone auditioned simply to appear as an extra in the wedding sequence of Carlo Rizzi and Connie Corleone.
Stallone later recalled the exchange: “‘We’re not sure you’re our kind of guy.’ Your kind of guy? The kind of guy who just stands there doing nothing and hiding behind a damn cake?” Stallone also revealed the explanation he was given: he “wasn’t Italian enough.”
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