Matt Dillon to Play Marlon Brando in ‘Maria’

Jessica Palud's film about Maria Schneider starring Anamaria Vartolomei, Matt Dillon and Jeremie Renier will finally start shooting this month.

I’m told Dillon is set to play Marlon Brando. Filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci will be played by Edoardo Pesce.

The film will obviously tackle the infamous “Last Tango in Paris” incident and the late Schneider’s claims of sexual abuse on the set of that film. There’s no way they don’t, it was a tumultuous moment in her career.

Just to refresh your memory, Schneider claimed that shooting the infamous butter sex scene in ‘Last Tango’ was traumatic because she hadn’t been consulted by Bertolucci and actor Marlon Brando beforehand, and that she felt “a little bit raped.”

Let us not forget that none other than Captain America himself, Chris Evans, stated in 2016 that Brando deserved jail time for his behavior on the ‘Last Tango’ set.

However, Schneider had very clearly stated in a 1997 interview that the sex was consensual. She did however admit that the anal-sex aspect “wasn’t in the original script,” and that “it was Marlon who came up with the idea,” and that “they only told me about it before we had to film the scene and I was so angry."

Bertolucci denied the whole incident in 2016. “I specified…that I decided with Marlon Brando not to inform Maria that we would [be using] butter,” he wrote. “We wanted her spontaneous reaction to that improper use [of the butter]. That is where the misunderstanding lies. Somebody thought, and thinks, that Maria had not been informed about the violence on her. That is false!

“Maria knew everything because she had read the script, where it was all described. The only novelty was the idea of the butter. And that, as I learned many years later, offended Maria. Not the violence that she is subjected to in the scene, which was written in the screenplay.”

Palud’s upcoming “Maria” will obviously tell Schneider’s side of the story. There’s no doubting that. Whatever happened on the ‘Last Tango’ set, the amalgam of first and second hand stories over these last five decades has only further blurred the facts of that incident. It doesn’t help that Bertolucci, Schneider and Brando are now no longer with us.