Marlon Brando: more than an idol to Johnny “The Ram” Rampole—something akin to a saint or a wayward prophet. Since his teenage years, Johnny had modeled himself after the Method great: dressing in torn T‑shirts, worn dungarees, and gritty leather jackets so retro they stood out like a sepia ghost in modern Manhattan.
Now in his forties and decidedly out of shape, Johnny looked like a miscast statue from a wax museum’s “1950s rebel” exhibit—thick around the middle and terminally confused.
His cramped Lower East Side flat was practically a shrine to a bygone era: black‑and‑white portraits of Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Eli Wallach—each one peeling off the wall with affectionate neglect. His bathroom was doubled as a library: dog‑eared manuals by Stanislavski and Stella Adler, Brando’s scripts, a signed “Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams, a shower curtain patched from Brando’s old movie posters—a retro‑movie saint’s altar, only dustier.
Johnny inhaled every Brando biography. He memorized every role, every nuance. “The Godfather” remained his morning ritual—slurring the Don’s lines into his coffee cup with cotton in his jowls, like some makeshift Marlonish apparition.
Meanwhile, the world whizzed past in the glare of TikTok filters, 15‑second celebrity pitches, and natural‑acting “charm.” Stanislavski and Strasberg were considered arthritic dinosaurs. Johnny himself became the token relic that casting agents half‑smirked at.
“They wouldn’t know Stanislavski from a hole in the wall,” he’d mutter, pledging silent revenge on a world that rewarded conformity, not soul‑torn breakthroughs.
His best friend was his mute neighbor, Silent Al, who faithfully listened to Johnny’s endless rants over toothpicks and Tahitian‑themed house specials in their dingy cafe booth.
“Actors used to be rebels! And now they’re spoon‑fed social‑media clowns! Me? I’m an open wound! The next bum hurts as much as I do, but I bleed from the inside out,” he’d proclaim to Al, who only chewed his toothpick harder in solidarity.
Johnny then turned to a Vietnamese waitress in a Tahitian grass skirt who spoke no English and told her he’d buy her an island if he ever made it big.
But that was all before the escapade that truly defined Johnny’s folly occurred. A long‑buried Brando passion project—“Wally and Bud,” about Brando’s friendship with Wally Cox—was revived by Alexandra Tamar, a VP of a major streaming network. Johnny, convinced he was destined for the Brando role, took a job as a taxi driver and stalked her address.
“Just a quick hop downtown,” Ms. Tamar said as she bounced into Johnny’s cab.
“You’re not—wait—are you Alexandra Tay-maar?” Johnny asked as he pulled away from the curb.
“Tay-mar.”
“Wow, what a coincidence; I was just reading about that Brando script in the trades a few weeks ago. Can you believe this?”
“Oh?” Ms. Tamar countered suspiciously.
“Like Brando, I myself am an actor with a tragic past. And, let’s say, like Wally Cox, I’ve had friends I’ve mistreated in the past and come to regret. Take my friend, Silent Al, for instance. Maybe he never says anything because I don’t let him. Life teaches you things.”
“I suppose it does,” Ms. Tamar replied, not knowing what to add.
“And many people don’t realize how truly sensitive Marlon Brando was. Have you ever read the love letters he wrote to Solange? Now there’s a movie—Marlon and Solange—that was a painful breakup,” Johnny said as he bit his lower lip.
“You can leave me off at the corner,” Ms. Tamar said.
Johnny gripped the wheel tighter, his throat working as if to swallow words he could no longer keep down. His eyes glazed over, and before he could stop himself, the dam broke.
“Ms. Tay-mar, you gotta cast me. I’d be the perfect nobody to play Marlon Brando—I can’t even believe I’m here before you, but look at me! I’m a loser straight from Palookaville, a nobody who coulda—coulda been somebody!—if fate didn’t slap me with a couple rotten breaks! I ain’t got nuthin’ in this life, Ms. Tay-mar, but a lousy broken dream to make good! I just wanna belong, damn it! You gotta gimme a chance!”
Ms. Taymar couldn’t get away from him fast enough, as she exited the cab and hurriedly boarded a city bus back to sanity. Johnny was left wondering what he might have said wrong.
Time crawled. Auditions failed. Johnny’s apartment’s once‑vivid lighting grew dim. Silent Al died—so quietly, in that silence, Johnny felt every word he had wasted. At the funeral, he sobbed through a eulogy thick with irony and grief:
“The thing I loved about him most was—he never said a word. It was all in his eyes! Now his eyes are shut! And that’s the tragedy here today, people. What kind of world… is a world where everyone has their eyes open but cannot see? And one man has his eyes shut but cannot speak?”
With Silent Al’s passing, the darkness inside Johnny stirred something fierce. He trained, polished his headshots, took elocution lessons, networked—he remembered what it meant to fight. Silent Al, the silent witness, would’ve wanted that.
Then came the audition: indie, Brando-esque, with a hint of possible redemption. It was a “Guys and Dolls” themed deodorant commercial, but still, there are no small parts, only small actors. So Johnny strode in, eyes alive, syntax meticulously crafted, ending with a flourish so fierce—he even plucked lint mid‑monologue—that the room's air crackled. The director’s gaze widened. Then: “You bring a real authenticity to your work, Mr. Rampole. We’ll be in touch.”
But, as days stretched into weeks, the call never came. Johnny figured that was that. What authenticity? He was a phony, and he knew it. “The Ram,” as he dubbed himself, was a ham. He walked the solitary back alleys of the Bowery like a two-bit nobody. Condemned to death. Even drunken derelicts wouldn’t give him the time of day. The city swallowed him.
“My problem is I wanna be great even before I’m good, and that’s why I suck,” Johnny thought to himself, kicking an empty soda can down the street.
Overcome with suicidal thoughts and tears streaming down his face, Johnny whispered, “All I ever had was a crummy dream to be an actor! For God’s sake, Marlon, I tried; I really did! But time after time, I came up empty! I could have been a contender if I wasn’t such a pretender!”
Just then, Johnny’s cell phone rang. So before throwing himself into the East River, he thought he’d answer it. “Ya’ never know, it could be another audition.”
“Hello?”
“Do you know what you’re doing?” a low and gravelly voice asked.
“Excuse me, who is this?” Johnny asked, clearing his throat.
“Who do you think it is?”
Johnny took a few uneasy steps as the voice at the other end sounded unmistakably like that of none other than Marlon Brando.
“Cat got your tongue?” the voice asked satirically.
“Is this someone playing a game?” Johnny sputtered.
“Are you playing a game?” Brando’s voice countered wryly.
“WHO IS THIS?!”
“I have spies everywhere in the world. I could be at your side and punch you right in the mouth in ten minutes flat if I like. So don’t get me angry.”
“Is this … Marlon Brando? I thought you were dead.”
“You thought I was dead? How do you know you’re not dead?”
Johnny gasped and searched for words.
“You’re a weak man, Johnny Rampole! WEAK!” Brando boomed, forcing Johnny to reel back as though pierced through the heart by a dagger.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Brando, I tried!”
“You tried nothing! You want to be me, and yet you don’t know the first thing about me!”
“I’m not trying to be you! I’m just going through a life-long lull!”
“Shut up and listen, you slobbering fool,” Brando commanded, “You’re going to call that director and tell her to give you the role.”
“Wow, you mean just call her? Wait, you didn’t see my audition, did you? I knew it! I knew you were there! I did everything Elia Kazan and Francis Ford taught us. Remember the concentration you had in ‘Apocalypse Now’ as Colonel Kurtz? That’s how deep I went! So, okay, yeah, I’ll call the director if you say so.”
“If I say so? Where’s the conviction in your voice? Without conviction, the words of an actor are meaningless. Show us who you are!”
“What do you mean? Precisely. No disrespect, I’m just trying to find the subtext to what you mean.”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. What is your intent?” Brando asked, putting Johnny on the spot.
“My intent is to um … is to find … what I want and why … in the scene,” Johnny whimpered.
“What would Silent Al say?”
“He wouldn’t say s**t, he never said anything!”
“He served a purpose in your life! Every time you looked into his eyes, you saw the truth! What would those eyes say now?”
Johnny took it in but said nothing in return.
“Let me tell you something,” Brando continued, “When I was a child, I had a friend whom I tied to a tree and left there. Because I considered him my inferior, it was an act of malice and cruelty that I’ve never quite forgiven myself, even these many years later.”
Brando’s voice cracked with emotion as he recalled his childhood and lifelong friendship with Wally Cox.
“As it turned out, that friend forgave me and stood by me my entire life. I’ve always been in awe of his strength to forgive me. He taught me what strength was—he whom I once saw as my inferior. My intention in life is never to be that cruel to anyone again. What is your intention in life, Johnny Rampole?”
Johnny was silent for a long time before Brando took a deep breath and spoke to him again in that low, dramatic voice that seemed to resonate from his soul.
“You’re the last Brando, the very last Brando. Act like it!”
At that point, the line went dead.
“Mr. Brando? Mr. Brando, are you there?”
Johnny took a moment and looked up at the night sky. He could hardly believe what just happened to him.
“Marlon Brando just told me I’m his heir apparent! Hey everybody, wake up! I just spoke to the Marlon Brando!“
Johnny ran through the streets, screaming to any window that would listen. He called the director, breathless and half-insane, praying that it meant something. And miraculously, her voice came back: “Your audition was magnificent…but you’re too short.”
Two inches. Two damned inches stood between him and his dream.
He trudged home, like a rebel without a clue, soaked from the bucket of water an annoyed neighbor lobbed at him as applause, heart thudding with loss—and the faintest, rebellious bloom of pride. Because Brando had called. Brando declared him his successor.
He crawled into bed: tears of grief, elation, regret all mingling. Brando’s voice, Al’s silent tutelage, velvet shadows of old‑world artistry—Johnny held them all in his roaring pulse. And, slipping Last Tango in Paris back into his DVD player, he drifted into sleep—dreaming that one day, someone would exhumed this kind of acting from its grave and, damned if they wouldn’t find Johnny Rampole waiting there.
© Michael Arturo, 2025
Michael Arturo is a playwright, screenwriter, and fiction author who also writes random essays on social and political issues. He was born and raised in New York City. His plays have been produced in New York, London, Boston, and LA. He also created the Double Espresso Web Series from 2010 to 2014.
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