(Credits: Far Out / Paramount Pictures / Seher Sikandar)
Even famed actors can find themselves needing a ride home on occasion, with Sean Penn dipping into his extensive list of equally notable contacts in order to secure a ride for himself and Marlon Brando following an ultimately fruitless trip to Mexico.
Penn had always held an admiration for The Godfather star, once telling Oprah Winfrey that “there’s never going to be a better actor than Marlon Brando”. The two would eventually strike up a friendship, and while they didn’t end up working together before the latter’s death in 2004, it wasn’t from a lack of trying.
In fact, Penn revealed to Conan O’Brien that he and Brando had flown down to Mexico on the dime of an unnamed studio in order to try and convince an author to let them adapt one of their books: “We had a project, Marlon and I had a project, that we really wanted to do,” he said. “The screenplay was written, but we didn’t own the rights to the book, so it was kind of a spec screenplay”.
He added: “We had to go down and try to convince the writer of that book, who was Gabriel García Márquez, to read this script and would he let us make this movie.”
Penn admitted that Márquez “had already told me no”, but he hoped that if they would “just show up at his door with Marlon as a man of the same generation,” the writer would relent. Unfortunately for the awards-laden duo, though, he wasn’t home and wouldn’t return for another five days. The film was never made in the end due to what Penn dismissed as “ridiculous reasons”, but they decided to remain in Mexico anyway.
Unwilling to risk the fanfare that would come with travelling through a public terminal, a lightbulb went off in Penn’s head after he remembered that John Travolta had always wanted to meet Brando: “We were thinking, ‘Gosh, it would be great to have another private jet,’ but going through an airport with Marlon was a whole thing,” he said before explaining that “John Travolta had mentioned to me that he’d really love to meet Marlon at some point – so I said to Marlon, ‘What do you think of John Travolta?’ He’s got his own plane.”
Travolta may have been working at the time, but Penn nonetheless “tracked him down on the set of Primary Colors” and laid out his plans by opening the conversation by teasing him about his long-held dream: “I said, ‘Hey, you wanna meet Marlon, right…’” which worked a treat when “he was down there two and a half hours later.”
It may have been Hollywood speak, but Penn was adamant that their activities were restricted to “laughing, playing chess, and telling stories” for the rest of the night. Fortunately, Travolta had brought another pilot with him, so he didn’t have to man the cockpit after taking a jaunt to Mexico with a pair of notorious hellraisers, but fulfilling his ambition of meeting Brando managed to arise under the most unexpected of circumstances.
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