Peyton Reed, whose upcoming Ant-Man threequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (making him the second director after Spider-Man’s Jon Watts—or Sam Raimi if the multiverse spanning No Way Home really means his trilogy is part of the canon) to have a full trilogy in the MCU and he has nothing but praise for the villain of his movie, Jonathan Majors.
In a recent spread on Majors done by the New York Times, Peyton Reed was quoted as saying he found the actor a lot like Marlon Brando—high praise for anybody in the acting profession, higher praise considering he’s talking about the flashy villain of a Marvel movie, as Majors plays the time-traveling Kang the Conqueror.
Comparisons to Marlon Brando (On The Waterfront, The Godfather) are inevitable when any actor reaches a certain stature in their work, Brando being considered a high watermark amongst the great actors of the 20th century—a name that rests with Newman, Bogart, Olivier and others—and carried the actor from the 1950s all the way through the new Hollywood of the 1970s where he went toe-to-toe with such rising stars as Al Pacino and James Caan. So Majors nabbing the coveted comparison already—after a career in which his biggest role to date has been in HBO’s Lovecraft Country—is no small thing.
Far be it from Reed to be the only one with something nice to say about Majors, however, who made his MCU debut in the final episode of the Disney+ series, Loki. When he was promoting Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Paul Rudd, aka Ant-Man himself, had this to say about the actor: “I’ve loved everything he’s done, and I see what he’s doing in this, and I’m knocked out by it.” Reed, however, topped what Rudd said: “It’s become a cliché over the decades to compare somebody to a young Marlon Brando, but Jonathan has that. He has just this energy and this presence, and our movie is definitely benefiting from that.”
It's high praise indeed—and the fact that he’s being praised by both co-stars and his director shows Majors differs from Brando in a few major ways. While Brando was undoubtedly talented, he was also a much more cantankerous person, often butting heads with his co-stars and his directors and having to have accommodations like his co-stars wearing bibs made up of cue cards since Brando got to where he refused to remember scripts after a certain point. Majors isn’t there yet—as Reed shrewdly used the young Brando comparison.
Source: The New York Times