Today in Well That’s Unexpected news, Billy Zane is starring in a biopic of Marlon Brando, and he is NAILING IT. The trailer for Waltzing with Brando dropped yesterday, and Zane done up as Brando is UNCANNY, like it’s almost TOO perfect.
The film is set in the Seventies, in the era that Brando was starring in such films as The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris but was also attempting to build a home cum resort on his personal Tahitian paradise, Tetiaroa Atoll. Today Tetiaroa is home to The Brando resort, but also an ornithological reserve and sites of ecological and archaeological study.
The film co-stars Jon Heder as architect Bernard Judge, who was known for incorporating environmental planning into his designs. It looks like Waltzing with Brando is largely about Judge’s experience trying to get Brando’s home—and resort—built on the island and all the crazy things that went along with it, which Judge documented in his book, Waltzing with Brando: Planning a Paradise in Tahiti.
It’s always fun to see Jon Heder outside of Napoleon Dynamite—a character so defining it’s basically Heder’s version of Luke Skywalker—but the appeal of Waltzing with Brando is Billy Zane as Marlon Brando, and the trailer knows it, giving us plenty of looks at Zane swanning around his tropical paradise.
The only time Zane shows through the Brando makeup is when he smiles, that grin is unmistakably Billy Zane.
My questions for Waltzing with Brando are these: 1) Could this kick off a Billy Zaneaissance and maybe an awards run in 2025, and 2) how jealous do you think Val Kilmer is of Billy Zane? I love Val Kilmer, I truly believe the man paved the way for actors like Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Gosling, his run of films in the Eighties—he made Top Secret!, Real Genius, and Top Gun back-to-back-to-back—is true king sh-t, but if you’re not aware, Kilmer went a little too Method during the making of The Island of Dr. Moreau and tried to out-Brando Brando, and the result is a deeply insane movie. There’s a great documentary by David Gregory called Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau that documents the making of that film that is well worth watching. It’s streaming for free on Tubi, Pluto, and Prime Video’s Freevee.
I also wonder if Waltzing with Brando mentions the assault of Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris. I’m going to assume no, because the film seems pretty focused on the effort to build on Tetiaroa, but this is in the same era. It’s all happening at the same time.
But mostly I wonder if this will put a spotlight on Billy Zane as we’ve seen recent comebacks from other Nineties heartthrobs like Brendan Fraser and Matthew McConaughey, the man who kicked off the renaissance trend by pivoting his career to more dramatic, character-focused work in the early 2010s. Zane has been a cultural touchstone since the Nineties, referenced in everything from Zoolander to Workaholics to Schitt’s Creek, but though he works a lot, he’s not often in the kind of projects we talk about here. But playing a legend like Brando is certainly going to cause some conversation.
Waltzing with Brando is set to premiere at the Torino Film Festival at the end of the month, and it’s currently selling to distributors at the American Film Market, prepping for a presumed 2025 release. Could we be talking about Billy Zane’s Oscar odds next year?
