In a 1940s Stella Adler class told to act like chickens facing a nuclear bomb, one student calmly pretended to lay an egg and said he was a chicken, so what did he know about bombs. That student was Marlon Brando. This episode goes beyond the leather jackets and mobster parodies to trace a bleak Omaha childhood with a harsh father and an alcoholic actress mother, expulsion and Shattuck Military Academy, a Korean War draft physical he escaped by listing his color as seasonal oyster white, and the Adler training that gave his trauma an engine.

We cover his sabotage of Tallulah Bankhead that freed him for A Streetcar Named Desire, studying boxer Rocky Graziano, living in a paraplegic ward for The Men, cue cards as a tool for messy real speech, the taxi scene in On the Waterfront, the leather-jacket craze after The Wild One, the 1960s slump of  ...