The audience sympathy

Rourke needed to play people like that. His star quality was so intense that it could not be submerged or ignored; it had to be utilized and acknowledged in whatever role he was playing. Marlon Brando had the same thing. It is difficult to cast these men properly. It is difficult to place them in a context. Their force of personality tends to take over the story, whether that is right for the project or not. Elia Kazan tells stories of how troubled he was during rehearsals for the Broadway production of Streetcar Named Desire with Brando as Stanley and Jessica Tandy as Blanche. He knew that the audience sympathy should reside with Blanche, but Brando's power made him undeniably the focus of the entire production, and audiences started to "side" with Stanley. They cheered when he raped Blanche. It upset Brando, too, because he felt that men like Stanley were why the world was such a horrible place, but he couldn't help what he was doing up on that stage. He simply entered a scene, saying nothing, and couldn't help but pull all of the attention his way. That kind of magnetism cannot be easily explained, but, like pornography, you know it when you see it. It cannot be faked.

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