Movie fans stunned by Hollywood star’s transformation into Marlon Brando

Can you tell who this actor is?

Film fans have been left severely impressed by an actor’s transformation into Marlon Brando for a new biopic.

Many actors have undergone unrecognisable transformations for roles, with Colin Farrell the most recent one to have done so for his role in acclaimed HBO series The Penguin.

But there’s a new person ready to take the crown for perhaps the most impressive transformation in recent years.

One star has become Brando for a new film titled Waltzing with Brando, which focuses on the actor between the years 16 and 1974, when he starred in The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris.

Waltzing with Brando will depict the actor starring as Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 gangster film, for which he won Best Actor at the Oscars, and film fans were taken aback when a still of this was released online.

The trailer has now been released online – but can you guess who it is playing Brando?

This is not Marlon Brando (X)

This is not a picture of Brando from The Godfather, but actor Billy Zane playing Brando in The Godfather.

The casting of Zane, whose credits include Dead Calm and Titanic, has stunned Brando fans, who are in agreement that the actor looks exactly like him in the photo.

“You could’ve said this was a photo of Marlon Brando and I would’ve believed it,” one stunned social media user replied when the photo surfaced online, with many others agreeing that they believed the photo to be Brando when they first saw it.

First trailer for the Marlon Brando biopic, starring Billy Zane as Marlon Brando.

In theaters next year. pic.twitter.com/JYYdHEDB5b

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) November 5, 2024

One person wrote: “No way this is Billy Zane. I can’t recognise him,” with another concluding: “This might be the greatest casting of all time…”

Waltzing with Brando, written and directed by Bill Fishman, is described as “the little-known but absolutely true story of how Marlon Brando convinced the architect Bernard ‘Bernie’ Judge that, together, they could build the first ecologically perfect retreat on one of Tahiti’s tiny, uninhabited islands”.

Billy Zane will play Marlon Brando in ‘Waltzing with Brando’ (Getty Images)

The synopsis continues: “Brando believed that this great ecological experiment would inspire the world to create a better and more sustainable future,” the synopsis continues. “Thus, Bernie, the practical problem solver, and Brando, the temperamental dreamer, begin an incredible adventure and, along the way, become improbable friends. But will this dream ever come true?”

There is currently no release date for the film.

Brando, whose other films included A Streetcar Named Desire, Guys & Dolls and On the Waterfront, died in 2004, aged 80.

Last month, horror fans were lured into watching new film Smile 2 after the “genius” casting of a famous Hollywood actor’s son.

Just like Smile, which starred the daughter of movie star Kevin Bacon, its sequel also features the offspring of somebody rather recognisable – whose face was plastered on eerie posters for the film.