‘Ferrari’ Driver Gabriel Leone Tapped Into Marlon Brando’s ‘Confidence’ for First English-Language Role

variety.com:

Stuart Miller Four years ago, Gabriel Leone appeared in a small Brazilian movie called “Piedade” playing a character named Marlon Brando; he was not playing the American actor but does bear a resemblance to a young Brando.

So it is only fitting that when the Rio de Janeiro native made his English-language debut, in Michael Mann’s “Ferrari,” he’s playing race car driver Alfonso de Portago, a stylish sportsman who both looked like and styled himself after “The Wild One.” “On the first or second page of the script, it refers to him as being like Brando,” says Leone, who had little time to prepare, flying to Italy a month after landing this huge career break.

He’d already watched most of Brando’s films but he went back to his early ones to prepare. “It was a big reference for me — the way my character dresses, but also his confidence, his energy, the way he faces the situations.” But Leone, who first gained attention for a TV series on Prime Video in Brazil called “Dom,” says that perhaps even more important to capturing his character was Mann’s insistence that all the actors spend time behind the wheel of a race car on the track. “He really wanted us to connect to that,” Leone says. “He loves the realism of the universe he’s shooting and wanted [us] to be inside the cars and feeling like real drivers, not only to pretend and let the stunt drivers do it all.” That approach really helped Leone find his way into his character. “It was the most important thing for me to understand why people did this even though the risks were so high,” he says. “You start connecting through the adrenaline rush — you want more and more and see how people get addicted to that because it makes you feel so alive.” At first, Leone drove.