10 Actors Who Hated Their Own Movie Characters
6. Marlon Brando - Stanley Kowalski (A Streetcar Named Desire)
The role of slovenly, abusive brute Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire was a career-making one for Marlon Brando, originating the part on Broadway and then reprising it on-screen in 1951, for which he received his first Best Actor Oscar nomination.
Yet despite the fact that it ultimately served as the foundation for the rest of Brando's storied career, the actor held nothing back when expressing his disdain for Stanley as a human being.
Brando took particular issue with the role making him, and by proxy his repugnant character, a sex symbol, and in his 1994 autobiography "Songs My Mother Taught Me," made pains to distance himself from a character he had no love for:
"A few writers have suggested that in portraying the insensitive, brutish Stanley Kowalski, I was really playing myself; in other words, the performance succeeded because I was Stanley Kowalski. I've run into a few Stanley Kowalskis in my life - muscled, inarticulate, aggressive animals who go through life responding to nothing but their urges and never doubting themselves, men brawny in body and manner of speech who act only on instinct, with little awareness of themselves. But they weren't me. I was the antithesis of Stanley Kowalski. I was sensitive by nature and he was coarse, a man with unerring animal instincts and intuition."