Table Manners with Jessie & Lennie Ware continue with their 17th series…
The latest offering features Matthew Broderick who spoke about working with Marlon Brando:
“I worked with Marlon Brando, believe it or not. His name at the hotel was Jim Dandy. He was on a very strict diet. He weighed about 900 pounds… He was fun to eat with. He was very charming, and he loved to tell stories, though it was always peculiar to watch him eating his lettuce leaf and, you know, and six almonds and things. I lived on the same floor and actually saw at night a guy come with a big cheese board.”
“He’s such a great man, such a great actor […] just to hear anything he has to say, or to watch how he navigates the table, the food, the people I just love watching him to tell you the truth.”
On his aliases when checking into hotels Broderick said, “I used to stay at hotels and give a name, but I would try to give a name that was as famous or more famous than me, I’m going to go under Michael Keaton. I would try that, or trying to think of somebody who’s, you know, doing better than me, a little better than me.”
Talking about eating with Sarah Jessica Parker he adds,” Me and my wife have never really worked together before, but [Plaza Suite] went very smoothly… We would go afterwards up to the bar, whichever that one is called. We would be very hungry after the show, so we would get whatever they had. Everything was little – little sausages, little egg rolls, little lamb chops.”
Matthew also ponders potentially moving to London,
“I think it would be great to live there. I always think about that. It’s [hasn’t] been possible unless [the kids] wanted to really go to school there, which they didn’t. We almost tried to do that for Plaza Suite, but it was their first year of high school, and they didn’t want to get socially behind and disappear.
“I love being there [but I] always feel a little bit like an outsider. I always say things a little wrong when I’m in England, like ‘I live three blocks away’.”
Talking about his mother’s cooking he notes, “My mom would call, scream out the window, and I would come running… She loved food. She had good things in the refrigerator. Everybody liked to come to that house and peer in there, because there would be things from a deli on the Upper West Side.”
Adding on his own cooking, “I follow recipes religiously. My wife likes to make simpler things that she knows how to make, where I might take on slightly more steps in a recipe.”
On his favourite nostalgic smell Matthew recalls, “My dad making bacon in the morning [or] when coffee used to come in a can already ground. Everybody in America, that’s how we had coffee.”
Table Manners is released weekly. You can listen here.
