Programming note: Our Marlon Brando series has been expanded from two parts to three, allowing us to give the final decades of his life and career the space they deserve. Part 2 is out now — Part 3 releases Tuesday, July 21.

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On December 3, 1947, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York, a twenty-three-year-old actor in a torn T-shirt walked onto a Broadway stage — and American acting was never the same again.

Before he became Marlon Brando, he was Bud: a restless, wounded kid from Omaha, raised in a house of drinking, silence, violence, and disappearing love. A boy who searched bars for his mother, fought his father, failed school, got expelled, and somehow found, on a stage, the one place where all that sensitivity finally had somewhere to go.

Part 1 of our three-part series on Marlon Brando traces the making of the actor who changed what screen performance could look like — from a hard-drinking Midwest childhood to Stella Adler's classroom in New York, from early Broadway roles to the night A Streetcar Named Desire opened and turned him into the most talked-about young actor in America.

It follows him into Hollywood on his own terms: no studio contract, no long-term deal, one film at a time. The Men. A Streetcar Named Desire on screen. Viva Zapata!. Julius Caesar. The Wild One. And finally, On the Waterfront — the film Elia Kazan built as a defense of informing, and the performance that would win Brando his first Oscar.

It also follows what fame could not fix. His mother Dodie, the open wound he never stopped trying to close. His mentor Kazan, who saw his genius before almost anyone — and then named names before HUAC. And the strange, uneasy fact that by the time Hollywood finally crowned Brando at thirty, the thing it wanted from him was already something he was trying to escape.

This is the story of how a restless, sensitive boy became the most important actor of his generation — and why, at the very height of his early power, he was already ready to burn it all down.

Part 2 of our three-part Marlon Brando series — covering Guys and Dolls, One-Eyed Jacks, Mutiny on the Bounty, his increasingly complicated personal life, his political activism, and the long stretch of commercial failures that left Hollywood convinced his best years were behind him — releases next Tuesday, July 14.

Part 3 — covering The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, his return to the top, and the long, complicated final decades of his life — follows Tuesday, July 21.

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When They Were Making It is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Rankin. Original artwork by Simone Beech and original music by Lionel Ziblat.

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Marlon Brando, Part 1: The Early Years — A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and the Oscar That Changed Everything

When They Were Making It

Marlon Brando, Part 1: The Early Years — A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and the Oscar That Changed Everything