Billy Zane Channels Marlon Brando’s ‘The Godfather’ in Biopic

Billy Zane Channels Marlon Brando’s ‘The Godfather’ in Biopic

Billy Zane continues to bring the late Marlon Brando back from the dead with his new movie.

Zane, 58, produces and stars in the upcoming Waltzing with Brandoa biopic that follows Brando during the 1970s, offering glimpses of the Oscar-winning legend in Last Tango in Paris and The Godfather.

A new production still from Waltzing with Brando — which is now set to have its world premiere at the Torino Film Festival in November — shows Zane looking like the spitting image of Brando’s Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather.

The new film from director and co-writer Bill Fishman is an adaptation of Bernard Judge’s 2011 book of the same name. The book tells the story “of a young Los Angeles architect who found himself, quite unexpectedly, living on an unpopulated atoll in the South Pacific with his client, Marlon Brando.”

(Left-right:) Marlon Brando; Billy Zane filming “Waltzing with Brando.”

Herbert Dorfman/Corbis via Getty, Camille Razat/Instagram


Judge, who died in 2021, was an award-winning architect whose innovations in building focused on environmental sustainability. Brando hired him to build a home on the 12-island atoll of Tetiaroa, Tahiti. In May, Zane and fellow producers Fishman and Dean Bloxom announced that they have pledged to send 5% of the film’s proceeds to residents of Tetiaroa.

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In addition to the Titanic actor, Waltzing with Brando costars Tia Carrere, Richard Dreyfuss, Jon Heder, Alaina Huffman, Rob Corddry and more.

Billy Zane in ‘Waltzing with Brando’.

Courtesy Torino Film Festival


“The production team were so on point,” Zane captioned some behind-the-scenes photos on Instagram providing a sneak peek at the movie in May. One photo showed the actor in Brando’s uncannily similar hair and costumes seated in a chair labeled “Marlon Brando.”

The Torino Film Festival runs from Nov. 22 to 30 in Turin, Italy, where Waltzing with Brando will be the closing night film. Also among Zane’s completed upcoming projects is INT.HALLWAY/NIGHTin which he stars and directs. This is his first film as director since 2004’s Big Kiss.