“Last Tango in Paris” star Marlon Brando’s son is coming to his father’s defense, following accusations that Brando raped his co-star Maria Schneider while filming an infamous scene from the movie.
“He’d be disgusted. Totally disgusted,” Miko Brando said when approached, in a video posted by TMZ.
“That’s not my father, he wasn’t that man at all. He was for human rights. civil rights. He marched with Martin Luther King,” the younger Brando added. “He was for the people, not against the people.”
“It’s not true,” Brando added. “That’s not the human being he is. ”
The issue arose over the weekend, after a 2013 interview with “Last Tango in Paris” director Bernardo Bertolucci resurfaced. In the interview, Bertolucci admitted Schneider hated him because of a scene in which Brando’s character uses butter as a lubricant to rape Schneider’s character.
Neither Bertolucci nor the actress, who spoke out in 2007 about her rage over the scene, said she was actually raped. But some over the weekend came to understand that she was after several confusing news reports. (Yahoo’s headline said, “Bertolucci admits infamous Last Tango ‘butter’ rape scene was non-consensual.” Time tweeted, “‘Last Tango in Paris’ director admits controversial butter rape scene was really rape.”)
Actress Jessica Chastain was among those who shared their outrage. “To all the people that love this film- you’re watching a 19yr old get raped by a 48yr old man. The director planned her attack. I feel sick,” she tweeted.
Bertolucci acknowledged in the 2013 interview that he had been “in a way horrible” to the actress: “I didn’t tell her what was going on. Because I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress. I wanted her to react and she felt humiliated… and I think that she hated me and also Marlon because we didn’t tell her that there was that detail of the butter used as a lubricant.”
Speaking to the Daily Mail in 2007, Schneider said that while what Brando was doing wasn’t real, she objected that the director and her co-star didn’t tell her well in advance about their plans for the scene.
“Even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears,” she said.
The younger Brando, whose father died in 2004, insisted that the accusations aren’t true, and suggested that Bertolucci might have had a financial motive for telling his story.
“Maybe he needed the money, the director needs the money. Maybe he needs a job, I don’t know the motive to it,” Brando said.
Watch the interview here.