The stars of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 gangster epic The Godfather drew inspiration for their performances from a number of sources, most notably—and quite obviously—real-life mobsters. For the voice of Don Corleone, Marlon Brando settled on doing an impression of Mafia boss Frank Costello. Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone was reportedly a composite of several different people, including Bill Bonanno, the son of the boss of the Bonanno crime family. James Caan, who played Michael’s hot-headed brother, Sonny, on the other hand, was surprisingly inspired by someone who had nothing to do with organized crime at all.
In a 1996 interview with Charlie Rose, Caan revealed that after he shot his first scene in The Godfather, he felt something about his character was a bit off. “The next morning I woke up and I just, for whatever reason, I started behaving like Don Rickles,” he told Rose. “I know that sounds weird, but all of a sudden it was like I came in and I just busted everybody’s stones,” Caan continued. “Why don’t you get that cleaned? You wore that seven days in a row,” he said to someone on set, referring to their clothes. “And I just started being Don Rickles and…that was it.”
Years later, Caan told Rich Eisen that he’d met Rickles at a young age and had gotten to hang out with him in his early days. “And Rickles, I mean, he just drove me nuts, you know? And he was so funny.” The night before returning to the set, Rickles popped into his head as he was shaving, and he started imitating him in the mirror, just as he would when he showed up for work the next day. “And Francis [Ford Coppola], God bless him, he let me go…he let me improvise a lot.”
Doing his best Rickles impression wasn’t the only fun Caan had on the set of The Godfather, though. In 2022, Robert Duvall said that he once dared Caan to moon Marlon Brando from his car window, and Caan happily obliged. Little did they know at the time that this would be the beginning of a mooning contest that Brando would ultimately win. They also couldn’t have possibly foreseen Brando getting drunk one day and inadvertently mooning Mafia Don Russell Bufalino’s family.
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