D.P. Welles

Marlon Brando once told Dick Cavett that everyone on Earth is an actor. Then he proved it, live on air, by dissecting Cavett himself. It remains one of the most disarming exchanges in talk show history. Cavett opened by pressing Brando on something he had read for years: that Brando considered acting "not a fit profession for a man." Brando deflected at first. "We can't believe the press; I don't know what we can believe in this country." But then, in his words, "in an effort to help your ratings," Brando laid out his real view of acting: "I think that we couldn't survive a second if we weren't able to act; acting is a survival mechanism, a social lubricant, and we act to save our lives every day." People lie constantly, he explained. By not saying what they think. By showing something they don't feel. By trying to give the appearance of feeling something they don't actually feel. Cavett pushed back: "But that's not acting." Brando disagreed: "That is acting. When you're nervous or frightened in this chair, or distressed and angry, you know that is not what is necessary to be shown here, so you control your face. You're a highly controlled person and you have to do that." Cavett argued there had to be gradations. He was motivated in the moment, but he couldn't wake up the next morning and repeat that same performance on command, take after take. Surely that skill, the thing Brando did better than almost anybody, was something different. Brando refused the compliment. He pointed to the office worker who hates his boss but performs enthusiasm for his "impossible notions" day after day to keep his job. Cavett countered that delivering the same line six times, getting "something deeper into it time after time," takes an actor. Everyday performances are one-time things with immediate motivation. "No, they're not one-time things because it's a daily procedure," Brando replied. "The dialogue changes but the motivation doesn't." Then came the moment the interview is remembered for. Brando turned the lens directly on his host: "Right now, you're thinking of 60 things at once: 'Is it getting dull? Is he upset? Is he bored? Is he offended? Here's a good time for a joke.' You're doing this editing at an insane rate with a demeanor of levity and zest, and that finally isn't what goes on in your mind or feelings at all." Cavett's response said everything: "I just feel like all my clothes have been taken off." Brando softened it. "I couldn't do what you do, and that's a different kind of acting; you're playing a different kind of role." Cavett tried one final test. He handed Brando a commercial script and challenged him to read it, any way he wanted. Brando refused flatly: "No, I won't do it." Cavett's closing line: "I'm glad you didn't. The man's incorruptible, and that's what I hoped." Source: The Dick Cavett Show, interview with Marlon Brando (1973)