Adrien Brody was just 29 when he won the best-actor Oscar for The Pianist, Roman Polanski’s haunting film set in the Warsaw Ghetto. He was the youngest ever recipient, a record that still stands. The immersive effort of preparing for the role, moving out of his New York apartment, avoiding friends, and starving himself to understand loss and isolation, left him depressed and exhausted. He did not work for a year afterward. The next role he took was a developmentally disabled murderous boy in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, a gothic tale of monsters in the woods; hardly leading-man material.
“I accepted that role without my agents even reading the script,” Brody told me with a wry expression. “Night didn’t want anyone to read it, so I honored his request.” Brody had come up working with directors like Spike Lee, Ken Loach, Barry Levinson, Steven Soderbergh, and Terrence Malick, and he wanted more of the same: interesting roles, collaborations with great artists. “I didn’t want to say: Okay, now I’m only looking for an overtly heroic character. I wanted to have a creative journey. But that is the problem.”
It’s a choice that has led to a career that can look, at superficial glance, like a slide after an early peak. But the optics are misleading. To date, Brody has made almost 60 movies playing a multiverse of characters, from punk rocker to ventriloquist to bull fighter to Roman general; he’s played Arthur Miller, Houdini, and a wonderfully whimsical Salvador Dalí in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. He has defied genre and typecasting, headlining big action movies like Peter Jackson’s King Kong and the Predators reboot; done sci-fi, thrillers, and horror; and become a recurring member of Wes Anderson’s film troupe. Some of his movies are critically acclaimed; plenty have bombed, but his performances are never less than wholly committed.
Brody is sanguine about the business of show business. In conversation he was open about the strange alchemy of moviemaking, and about the interplay of fame, publicity, and marketability. He told me that before winning an Academy Award, actors tend to be judged on their performance; afterward they are more likely to be held responsible on how well the movie did as a whole, critically and commercially.
“That is an actor’s dilemma,” he said. “But an actor’s journey should be a much more creative process, full of experimentation, full of risk.”
This year Brody, now 51, finds himself again at the center of awards attention for his performance as László Tóth, a fictional Jewish Hungarian architect trying to rebuild his life in America after the Second World War, in Brady Corbet’s monumental masterpiece The Brutalist. It’s a very different movie from The Pianist, but in some ways, with its postwar setting and themes of art and loss, an inadvertent sequel, and for Brody, perhaps, an expiation. “It’s taken me two decades to find something of this caliber, and for that I’m grateful.”
I met Brody last October in London, where he was starring in The Fear of 13, a play by Lindsey Ferrentino that portrays the real-life Nick Yarris, who spent 22 years on death row in Pennsylvania before being exonerated through DNA evidence. It was the first time Brody had done theater since he was a teenager; the reviews were glowing, and he was enjoying the freedom of reinterpreting his performance night to night.
The play was staged at the Donmar Warehouse, a famously intimate venue for new and experimental productions, only 250 seats, and it ran an hour and 45 minutes without an intermission. Brody held the stage as magnetically as he holds the screen, deftly rendering Yarris’s different phases and facets: wisecracking street-tough, philosophical inmate, man in love, abused child. He told me that Yarris himself comes often to see the performance and that he has wept in catharsis. “He shared with me how I have personally lifted away so much pain and suffering by helping to tell his story.”
