Christopher Reeve was equally bald after working with Brando on it Superman. When asked if it was exciting to work with one of his acting idols, Reeve said, “Absolutely not, no. The guy didn’t care.” He said that Brando “took the two million and ran” and complained that it was painful to watch someone of Brando’s ability “phone in” because Reeve himself cared so much about the job. That’s a pretty brutal review from the guy who plays your son.
The Sophia Loren story from Countess of Hong Kong it is darker. In her memoir, she recalled that Brando suddenly “put his hands on me.” She said immediately, she warned him, “Don’t you want to do that again. Never again!” According to Loren, he never did – but “he was very difficult to work with after that.” She later described Brando as someone whose personal problems could make life difficult for the entire cast.
And then Dennis Hopper was on Apocalypse now. Hopper later said, “We had a lot of problems together.” Their relationship became so bad that Brando refused to be ready when Hopper was there, forcing him to film parts of their material separately. Which is pretty impressive: most people who hate a co-worker just avoid them at lunch. Brando seems to have reshaped the production of the workaday around him.
To be fair, many actors respected Brando and spoke of learning from him, and Loren himself still called him “a great, great actor.” But yeah… it seems sometimes the method actor was a method asshole.