Penelope Ann Miller: Freshman Up Against Brando and DeNiro

“The Freshman’s” Penelope Ann Miller has, mercifully, but a single scene with the feisty, tail-snapping, eight-foot Komodo dragon-impersonating lizard around which the plot revolves. The downside is that Miller must share the screen with a far more terrifying presence: Marlon Brando.

“I wasn’t intimidated by him at all,” says the L.A. native of the legendary actor. “In fact, I found him to be very friendly and sweet. When I met him, he gave me a big bear hug. . . . He cracked a couple of my ribs.”

She had the gumption to darken her hair for the audition. You see, a sandy blonde just doesn’t cut it portraying the daughter of New York “importer” Carmine Sabatini.

Miller has done plenty in features, TV and on the stage, but she is still enough of an unknown to be in an American Express commercial. Not for long, though. The daughter of actor-filmmaker Mark Miller is teamed with Robert DeNiro and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the soon-to-be-released “Awakenings” and “Kindergarten Cop.”

“You never really know how you’re gonna feel when it happens,” says Miller of the fame thing that seems to loom. “I don’t get recognized very much because I look so different in my movies. I’d rather be acknowledged for my work than for me as a personality.”

There was a familial atmosphere on the set of this little comedy. Because of that, Miller, like almost everyone else, was floored when Brando called it “terrible, a stinker,” soon after production ceased. Brando later withdrew his critique, but damage was done.

“I was definitely shocked. I mean, everybody was,” says Miller. “Nobody expected it, because that wasn’t our experience. That wasn’t his experience, so we didn’t understand what happened.

“We thought: ‘Is this a joke?’ ”