Adrien Brody was simply 29 when he gained the best-actor Oscar for The Pianist, Roman Polanski’s haunting movie set within the Warsaw Ghetto. He was the youngest ever recipient, a report that also stands. The immersive effort of getting ready for the position, transferring out of his New York house, avoiding associates, and ravenous himself to grasp loss and isolation, left him depressed and exhausted. He didn’t work for a 12 months afterward. The following position he took was a developmentally disabled murderous boy in M. Evening Shyamalan’s The Village, a gothic story of monsters within the woods; hardly leading-man materials.
“I accepted that position with out my brokers even studying the script,” Brody informed me with a wry expression. “Evening didn’t need anybody to learn it, so I honored his request.” Brody had come up working with administrators like Spike Lee, Ken Loach, Barry Levinson, Steven Soderbergh, and Terrence Malick, and he wished extra of the identical: fascinating roles, collaborations with nice artists. “I didn’t need to say: Okay, now I’m solely on the lookout for an overtly heroic character. I wished to have a inventive journey. However that’s the downside.”
It’s a selection that has led to a profession that may look, at superficial look, like a slide after an early peak. However the optics are deceptive. Up to now, Brody has made nearly 60 motion pictures enjoying a multiverse of characters, from punk rocker to ventriloquist to bull fighter to Roman common; he’s performed Arthur Miller, Houdini, and a splendidly whimsical Salvador Dalí in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. He has defied style and typecasting, headlining massive motion motion pictures like Peter Jackson’s King Kong and the Predators reboot; carried out sci-fi, thrillers, and horror; and turn into a recurring member of Wes Anderson’s movie troupe. A few of his motion pictures are critically acclaimed; loads have bombed, however his performances are by no means lower than wholly dedicated.
Brody is sanguine in regards to the enterprise of present enterprise. In dialog he was open in regards to the unusual alchemy of moviemaking, and in regards to the interaction of fame, publicity, and marketability. He informed me that earlier than profitable an Academy Award, actors are usually judged on their efficiency; afterward they’re extra prone to be held accountable on how effectively the film did as an entire, critically and commercially.
“That’s an actor’s dilemma,” he mentioned. “However an actor’s journey must be a way more inventive course of, stuffed with experimentation, stuffed with threat.”
This 12 months Brody, now 51, finds himself once more on the heart of awards consideration for his efficiency as László Tóth, a fictional Jewish Hungarian architect making an attempt to rebuild his life in America after the Second World Warfare, in Brady Corbet’s monumental masterpiece The Brutalist. It’s a really totally different film from The Pianist, however in some methods, with its postwar setting and themes of artwork and loss, an inadvertent sequel, and for Brody, maybe, an expiation. “It’s taken me 20 years to search out one thing of this caliber, and for that I’m grateful.”
I met Brody final October in London, the place he was starring in The Worry of 13, a play by Lindsey Ferrentino that portrays the real-life Nick Yarris, who spent 22 years on demise row in Pennsylvania earlier than being exonerated by DNA proof. It was the primary time Brody had carried out theater since he was a young person; the evaluations had been glowing, and he was having fun with the liberty of reinterpreting his efficiency night time to nighttime.
The play was staged on the Donmar Warehouse, a famously intimate venue for brand new and experimental productions, solely 250 seats, and it ran an hour and 45 minutes with out an intermission. Brody held the stage as magnetically as he holds the display screen, deftly rendering Yarris’s totally different phases and sides: wisecracking street-tough, philosophical inmate, man in love, abused baby. He informed me that Yarris himself comes usually to see the efficiency and that he has wept in catharsis. “He shared with me how I’ve personally lifted away a lot ache and struggling by serving to to inform his story.”
