'Claim to Fame' Star Shares 'Craziest' Memory with His Grandfather Marlon Brando
In Part One of the two-part season finale of Claim to Fame, Shane's fate in the game changed with the uncorking of a wine bottle. Throughout the first six episodes of Season 3, he'd been sitting pretty. In a game based on keeping the identity of your celebrity relative a secret, Shane had kept his cast mates largely in the dark. Other than a few haphazard hunches ("Maybe Forest Whitaker?"), no one seemed to have any idea as to who Shane was related to.
Then came the wine cellar clue. After winning the challenge, Mackenzie earned the final wine cellar clue of the season and quickly decoded the clue to read "Hollywood icon with Italian kingpin roll." The Godfather reference was quickly paired with those from Apocalypse Now and Shane became a sitting duck. At the guess off, Mackenzie voted herself into the guesser position, taking power into her own hands and guessing that Shane is related to Marlon Brando. As it turns out, she was right.
Shane is actually Shane Donovan Brando and in the episode, he shared with his fellow cast members about growing up with his grandfather, the actor and activist.
After his elimination, Shane sat down with Parade to discuss his time on the season, his relationship with Marlon Brando and the Claim to Fame Season 3 group chat.
Here's what Shane had to say:
ABC
Matthew Huff: How did you first hear about the show and end up getting cast?
Shane: It's actually kind of funny. My co-manager watches the show very avidly and at work one day, she literally had it on in the background and said, "Hey, Shane, you'd be great for the show." I watched like half an episode with her, and I was like, "This actually looks really fun." She sent me the questionnaire via email a couple of weeks later. I filled that out immediately, sent that over, kind of forgot about it. Then slowly but surely, I started getting reached out to and got picked to be on the show.
Related: 'Claim to Fame' Announces 3 New Twists for Season 3
You talk in this episode about spending time with your grandfather when you were young. What was that like? And do you have any special memories of him?
My grandpa was just a very unique individual, but growing up, I always just knew him as my grandpa. My best memories with him were like hanging out in the pool. There was a point where we were swimming in the pool, and we see this bee on the edge of the water. He picks up the bee in his hand, and the bee's fully alive. He says, "Shane watch this," and then opens up his mouth and sticks out his tongue. He places the bee on his tongue, and the bee's wings are still fluttering a little bit. Then he closes his mouth, and after a quick beat, he opens his mouth, sticks his tongue out, blows a little bit of air and the bee kind of flies away. I was in shock. That was the craziest thing i've ever seen.
You had one of the more famous relatives in the house. What was your strategy going in knowing that the clues were probably going to be more obvious for you than for other people?
Luckily for me, I'm a little bit more racially ambiguous, so I knew a lot of stories about my childhood don't really give much away. My game plan was to be honest and be myself. I thought that would actually throw everybody off. Being so open to share stories that are all true seems a little bit fishy, you know? I was completely honest about going to Neverland and having dinner with Liz Taylor. If you could connect the dots, you deserve to win.
My other biggest thing was to be clueless about my clues, because I felt like if the second I started acknowledging my clues and hyper-fixing on them, I would start getting myself in trouble.
You were the last person whose wine cellar clue was picked. Was that just luck or was there some sort of strategy involved?
It was a little bit of both because there were certain situations where I definitely campaigned and got myself out of having my wine clue picked. There are things that happened that rubbed other people the wrong way, so that they didn't pull my clue. In the second episode Naomi was going to pick my clue, but she teamed up with Hud and Adam [and pulled Hud's clue so other people wouldn't have it.]
You were in the bottom two multiple times, but you never had to make a guess. If you had been the guesser in those weeks, would you have gone home?
It depends on the week. I was at the bottom two way too often. But I always, I always had Dedrick in my back pocket. So that was always a safety net. Then I had Naomi in my back pocket for an episode. So it depends on which time it was.
You're the only the second person this season to have been guessed correctly. In previous seasons a lot more people were guessing correctly? Why did everyone struggle so much this season?
I think it has to do with time. If we spent a little more time with each other, I think we would have had more opportunities to slip up. Maybe story times could have been more developed so we could figure each other out. Other than that, the clues were so hard this year. It's not like we had a smoking gun. Everything was so vague. We had half the clue. It never made us fully confident.
How long were you guys there filming?
From start to finish I was a little over two weeks
Did at any point you slip up and reveal something about yourself that you didn't want to?
On third night, Adam, Danny and I are talking in my room and we're just shooting the shit. We're talking about the kids, and I really want to start my own family one day, and I literally said verbatim, "Yeah, I just really want to be Coach Brand..." I said the first syllable of my last name, and I was like, "I don't want to coach brain dead kids. That's what I was trying to say." I literally sat up in bed all night. I was like, "Should I start packing now? Is this it for me?" But they never caught on. I was waiting for Danny to open up his notebook with the endless names that he had in there. He just never did. And Adam is Adam. He wasn't paying attention to anything anyways.
Was there anything else from filming that you wish had made the edit?
Danny snoring probably could have had its own segment on the show.
Are you still in touch with other players from the season?
I'm in touch with everybody. We're all in a group chat that I created for everybody. It's been a really cool ride. We've been talking quite a lot with each other. Also Danny, Naomi and I have our own little private group chat because we're all around the same age, and we all had really good knowledge. We were there to play the game. We were really like committed to gameplay.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
