Adrien Brody

With other kinds of words, though, it will often come to feel as though there are fault lines everywhere. Seconds after this initial declaration, I ask Brody – my question intended as little more than small talk to fill the empty space between us as we greet each other and take our seats – whether it feels like he’s being carried away in a whirlwind. He responds – not just in his words but in his body language too – as though he’s being somehow misunderstood or as though something wonderful is at risk of being spoiled.

“No, it’s not that at all,” he says, correcting me firmly. “No, my feet are on the ground. I’m ultra-present. I’m ultra-present and able to reciprocate the love. It’s different. Being older gives you a degree of perspective. It’s been a very long time since I’ve had an opportunity to do the work that I’m yearning to do. And the work is completed. So this is just something magical.”

Brody will prove to be engaging, fascinating company, and a man with plenty to say. In our conversation there will also be moments where he exudes a sense – verbally, but also through a repertoire of expressions that seem to hover between saddened and harried – that the world doesn’t quite get him.

What I then find myself wondering is whether such a sensibility might be a consequence of setbacks and reversals he has faced along his idiosyncratic chosen path, or whether it’s such a sensibility which sends you down that path in the first place. Conversely, I also find myself wondering whether it’s exactly this kind of off-kilter mindset which, when everything comes together in just the right way, somehow fuels Brody’s singular ability to inhabit and transmit a role like ‘The Brutalist’s’ László Toth with such compelling, all-consuming mastery.

After reading, Brody met with the director, Brady Corbet, who had written the script with his professional and personal partner, the filmmaker and actor Mona Fastvold, for brunch downtown. “A very long meeting – conversed a lot about lots of things,” Brody recalls. Nonetheless, he learned in due course that another actor had been chosen. “The message comes from your agent,” he says. “It’s either you get the message or they hope you’ve forgotten.” That’s the pattern. “I mourned the loss of this one,” he says. “I did not have expectations that it would be what it is today – I still mourned the creative loss of what I wanted to pour into it.”

Brody makes clear that over his career he has learned that this will happen, and maybe even why. “As an actor, you may be right for certain roles and you’re not necessarily eligible for them,” he says. “Even if you are quite a well-known actor and quite a successful actor. Because there are all these factors that are out of your control. You know, there are lists, and lists are based on a number of things that one might deem as an indication of success, and yet one may not. Right? You know, consistent box office earnings are the primary reason you would be on the top of a list. But if you do make experimental choices and interesting choices in an artistic pursuit in a business, it’s not met with the same appreciation as, you know, your mother might have for your varied tastes.”

Brody points out that he’s balanced experimentation with “big blockbuster movies”, and that he enjoys those too. “But I like the range,” he says, and his suggestion seems to be that too much range has consequences. “I’m aware of how it has made certain things, such as this even, challenging,” he says. “Where I’m probably the most right performer for the role, but I wasn’t deemed valuable enough.”

This time, thankfully, everything eventually worked out. The film’s shoot was delayed several times, in part because of Covid, and by the time the project fell back in place the actor previously scheduled to play László Toth, Joel Edgerton, was no longer available. Brody heard from his agent that the role was back in play. Even then, it wasn’t as though Brody simply got a call saying the part was his. “No, not at all,” he says. “Not at all.”

In the end, though, it was. Finally given the chance, he threw himself into it. “I knew we were making something special,” he says. “I wish I knew why things come when they do. This moment is because we’re very fortunate – all of us who have been involved in this project – that every collaborative creative element lifted up the other.”

It’s around now, a few minutes into our meeting, when another question seems to throw Brody, though this time the person asking is not me. It is the waiter, asking what Brody might like to eat or drink. From Brody’s reaction, you could easily think that he finds such an inquiry – at a pre-booked table by the window in a high-end New York hotel bar – somewhat perplexing. He talks aloud through this latest dilemma. “I’m not sure what I’m needing,” he says, then considers one kind of option. “I’m happy to have a drink,” he weighs, “but I’m also not needing it just yet.” He expands this thought. “I don’t really need anything.”

After vacillating further, he orders an oak milk decaf latte.

“Not too much milk,” he adds. “Just nice and strong.”

“I’ve been doing this so long, since I was a boy,” he says when I ask about that period. “There’s an ebb and flow in everything, in your own creative connections and personally, professionally in life, right? So I also was not under any illusion that it should just flow. But I found it oddly challenging to be up against things like this. I feel that I’ve proven my range. I’ve worked. The reason it seems inconsistent is I’ve been consistent in trying to break out of the box of subjective perception of what I am capable of doing, or what I represent for a character, or physically. Whatever it is. Too specific, often. And they find that…” He pauses, considering his words. “There’s a safer option, basically.”

So he was losing faith?

“It wasn’t being reciprocated, for whatever reason,” he says. “It wasn’t. What I had to give was somehow not understood or not of value. I didn’t feel that I was of service and of value.”

How did that lack of reciprocation make him feel?

“I didn’t feel like I needed to prove that I was worth it. If I wasn’t, I’m going to go do something else that makes me feel good. I work primarily to feel connected and to feel immersed in something creative. And I handle my side of the bargain.”

I ask him whether he feels like he does all this for the same reasons as his peers do it.

“I mean, I would think so,” he says. “Like what? Like what reason?” Then he supplies his own answer. “I think anybody who cares about what they’re doing, which is such personal work – you have to embody the role. You have to ingest it and live it and feel it and be it. And you can only do that well if you feel it and believe in it.”

But, I put to him, my gut feeling is that a lot of actors including some very talented people, may have a slightly more detached or casual relationship with their work.

“Yeah,” acknowledges Brody, and he laughs in a way that’s tricky to read. “I’m not detached enough. Or casual, I guess.”

I point out that, although I’ve only known him for 20 minutes, my sense is that he doesn’t want to be.

“No, I don’t,” he agrees.

When I further echo this, suggesting out loud that he wants to be like he is – the notion seems to spark something in Brody, this time in a more helpful way.

“You know, it’s funny,” he says. “When I was young, there were a lot of tough kids in my neighbourhood, and I was always very sensitive. I was always amazed at how certain ones weren’t empathetic. You know, how they would torture ants and things when we would play, and how they got pleasure out of that. I was littler than them, and I didn’t really want to say all the time, like, ‘Why are you going to hurt…?’ because they’ll just pick on me. And I was always kind of aware that it was harder. It was harder to be more sensitive.”

From the age of four, Brody grew up in the New York suburb of Woodhaven, Queens, and he has occasionally alluded over the years to various rough aspects around the edges of this experience of growing up in a neighbourhood suffering from high levels of drug and gun crime. He compares it in general terms to his life these days: “Now, I have no one in my life that isn’t on the path that I feel we should all be on. But I think growing up in Queens I didn’t know anyone, really, who was on the path.”

And yet, I point out to him, it sounds as though while he’s grateful for what he didn’t end up doing, he still feels slightly romantic about that world.

“I am a little nostalgic for it,” he agrees. “It wasn’t terrible. It was also another time. Like, the whole world was different, let alone New York City. It was different. There were no [mobile] phones. I was on the street very young. I was taking the train. I was riding bikes with a bunch of kids around the neighbourhood. I was getting into trouble. I was kind of left on my own. I didn’t have a pager or a phone with a tracker on it. I wasn’t seeing what kids were doing on social media and living a better life, and ‘Why don’t I have these sneakers?’ I just lived. Lived.”

Following up on what he’d just said, I ask him what trouble he was getting into; this will be another of those moments where the mood shifts. “Here we go…” he says. But he nonetheless offers a response.

“I was around a lot of…yeah, a lot of stuff,” he says. “It was a lot of hardship…and there was a lot of… It was wild. It was just a wild time. You know, I was a good kid…but I was around a lot.”

There are a lot of long pauses in this answer, and as he speaks I feel like I can almost see all the things Brody is remembering but not saying flashing across his eyes and around the edges of his mouth. It’s quite a show. If I could transcribe everything he thought of between those sentences, I suggest to him, it would be quite a paragraph, wouldn’t it?

“It would be,” he confirms, and his laugh seems one of genuine shared amusement. “Yes. It sure would. And I’d love to share wonderful stories with you. Just somehow things always get taken out of context. I never would brag about doing things that…you know, whatever.”

This, for instance, is from 1977, when he was four years old: “Mommy, I had a very sad dream. I was in a restaurant with a grown-up girl and I really liked her. She even bought me ice cream. But when we came out she just crossed the street and left me, and I’m not allowed to cross the street by myself. She just said good-bye and I don’t know why she left me. I loved her even more than I love you. I’m going to sing a song about it: ‘She left me and I don’t know why she left me, I really loved her.’”

And this is from the following year, when he was five: “Mommy, I had a bad dream; men made out of metal were after me with their metal ray guns. But then my nose started bleeding, I shouted ‘Time Out!’ and they all stopped.”

When I mention these to Brody, I comment that it sounds like he was a strange kid.

“I don’t think it was that strange,” he counters. “It was imaginative.”

What kind of four-year-old, I ask him, tells a fully realised story about a girl not being in love with him, or a five-year-old about men of metal coming at him?

“I don’t know,” he says. “This one.”

I reiterate: Not everyone, I promise you.

“But you think it’s strange?” he says. I point out that I like that he said those things. “Okay, good. It’s unusual – I don’t disagree. Yeah, it’s something.” After we talk a little more, he adds: “They sound like me. It sounds like something I would come up with.”

And that, I point out, is what I’m trying to understand.

“You can see that I’m an actor,” he reflects, “and that was her intuition.” He seems to be casting forward from age five to a famous pivot point in his life: when he was 11, his mother was sent on assignment to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and when she saw their young people’s programme she thought it might suit her son. That’s how Brody started acting. He talks more about those qualities he had as a child. “I can see a lot of things, and I can see circumstances – imagine them fully,” he says. “Quite fully in emotion. I think those are qualities that are necessary to inhabit others. I am quite empathetic, and I think that’s been cultivated through that process.”

But it’s interesting, I say, that he was like this when he hadn’t yet had any training.

“No,” he says, agreeing.

So where do you think it comes from?

“No idea,” he says. “Just there.” But then he offers what seems like a suggestion. “My parents treated me with respect as a child. They didn’t treat me like a child.”

Brody has said that his parents saw acting as a way of keeping him out of the trouble that might have subsumed him in the neighbourhood. When I ask whether this was a big impulse, he says no at first but then offers up a surprising detail. “My dad considered me going to a military academy at one point. He knew what was around. Both of them understood that I needed some kind of creative outlet, that I was very creative. And that’s what’s evident in those things: that I had a very imaginative mind, a very curious mind. And hanging out on the block wouldn’t have given me a leg up in that space. It would suppress it, ultimately.”

In the lead-up to the release of a film Malick was yet to show to anybody, Brody did press interviews as the hot new young star he now was presumed to be. Malick did call him at one point and mentioned that his role had been “reduced”, but nothing even slightly prepared him for the truth. Just before the film’s release – still a grand secret – Brody was invited to what he was told was a private screening in New York. He took his parents. It wasn’t a private screening – selected press were there too – and as the film’s nearly three hours unspooled in front of everyone, Brody discovered that Malick had completely changed his movie in editing. Brody’s character appeared on screen for only a few minutes, and you could count the fleeting lines he spoke on one hand.

Brody has often talked about this as a formative experience and a key moment in his story, but today he seems less willing to reflect on it. “You want to get into all the past and the hardships. I don’t think about them. I don’t harp on them. You can reference them all you like, but I don’t harp on them,” he says.

I point out that the whole point of talking about any of this is to provide context to his role in ‘The Brutalist’ being such a triumph. And though it’s a little awkward to raise, I feel like he should know that I’ve spent much of the last eight years writing a book about events during the Holocaust in Lithuania and how one deals with the aftermath (the recently published ‘No Road Leading Back’), which, in a very different way, processes some of the same themes that lie at the heart of ‘The Brutalist’. We talk about that for a while. “It’s good to represent these stories,” he says respectfully.

Eventually I tell him that I should ask him some more annoying questions about his past.

“It’s not annoying – it’s really not,” he says, and returns to the subject of ‘The Thin Red Line’. “It’s just, to then read it again – this moment, this terrible situation…” Even so, whether or not because of the break we have had, Brody addresses the situation with some thoughtfulness. “I do feel like you asked me why and how things happen,” he says. “And I don’t know, but that happened for a reason. You know what I mean? And that shaped me. It shaped my journey. It gave me a great understanding of loss as it pertains to my work. And had potential to be very detrimental to my future and the work that I’ve dedicated my whole life to. I gave everything to that project, too. Unquestioningly.”

It could have broken you, I point out.

Yes,” he exclaims. “I was 23! But my dad always has a really great perspective of it.” (Brody’s father, Elliot, is a retired history teacher.) “He said: ‘That movie, as painful as it was for you, made a lot of people know about you in your business. Whether they saw your work or not, they knew about you.’ And he’s right. But I was concerned one could make the assumption that I must not have been good enough for the part. You have this iconic filmmaker who hasn’t made a movie in all these years, and then you have an actor who out of nowhere gets this thing – he must not have been good enough. And that’s what I felt. Like, I had no way to prove my side of this.”

Thankfully, at least through the lens of history, not too long a time passed between what could have been a debilitating humiliation and Brody’s first unequivocal triumph: playing the central figure in Roman Polanski’s ‘The Pianist’, based on the true story of a Polish-Jewish musician, Władysław Szpilman, and his desperate struggles to survive in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. “It was profound – and also out of nowhere, you know,” Brody says. “It was only a few years from where I thought: ‘I may never work again.’”

To me, Brody seems like the kind of high-wire actor who, in a film that works less well, can sometimes appear stranded; you can almost viscerally feel the disconnect between the film he’s imagined and the film that is. But when everything works it’s the opposite: he entirely inhabits a character in a way which is mesmerising without being showy. So it is in ‘The Brutalist’; so it was in ‘The Pianist’. “It was nothing I had experienced,” he reminisces. “You know, I had such a responsibility throughout the making of it, saddled with the need to faithfully represent a survivor’s story and what it speaks to of the enormity of loss. And [as] a young man, I had to deeply immerse and understand that level of loss that was so profound that I didn’t have an understanding, really. I opened up a portal to a depravity and the horror and cruelty that exists. My association to darkness was very different prior to that. So that was a big shift. Darkness and light. And finding light through darkness…”

At this very moment, something remarkable happens. Presumably in response to the dwindling daylight outside, just as Brody says the phrase “light through darkness”, the lighting in the hotel bar suddenly surges to about twice its previous level of brightness.

“See!” he declares. “I have a way about me!” He looks delighted. “If we did that on the take,” he says, “that would be in the movie!”

For his role in ‘The Pianist’, Brody was nominated for an Oscar for the first time. The other four nominees – Jack Nicholson, Michael Caine, Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicolas Cage – had all previously won Oscars, and in the weeks beforehand, as the major precursor awards were announced, Brody won none of them.

But on the evening, it was his name that was read out. He became – and to this day remains – the youngest winner of the best actor trophy.

“Time did slow down,” he says. “I remember that. I remember that feeling where it literally warped down to something. It was enormous. It was enormous. And it was a real outpouring of love. That room lit up. And there I was, surrounded by so many people I admire, and all the influential people in my industry. And I just… I was plucked from obscurity. I had been working and toiling away as an actor for 17 years. And overnight” – he laughs – “I was now successful. In the world’s eyes.”

It’s also the kind of low-hanging fruit ready-made for awards show hosts, and in the first few minutes of the Golden Globes, during comedian Nikki Glaser’s opening monologue, she said, “Oh, look! It’s two-time Holocaust survivor Adrien Brody.” As the camera fixed on his face, Brody gamely grinned and blew Glaser a kiss.

As I watched, I tell him, I wondered whether he was wincing slightly inside.

“Of course,” he says. “Of course. You know the nature of her humour. Of course. I feel very privileged to have been able to speak to this horrific time in my work. Such great depths. And there’s been a lot of ancestral loss and struggles, and I don’t take it lightly, obviously.”

Not long before Brody leaves the bar, I ask him what he thinks his talent is. He takes some time before he starts to speak.

“I’ve managed to not lose the imaginative quality of my youth through my experiences in life,” he tells me. “And I can apply that similar curiosity and enthusiasm to my work, and my encounters with others. And it gives me a sense of freedom. And I can incorporate that into my work, and the process of doing my work. I can find, I can access, things that I find quite fulfilling and real, that shed light on lots of things in my work and in life. So that is what I’m most grateful for.”

I ask him when he’s happiest.

“When I’m working,” he says. “When I’m immersed in something creative. The most alive, yes. Definitely not on vacation or something. I don’t know. I’m more happy working.”

He says he doesn’t yet know what he will do next. “There are a few things that are interesting,” he says. (Naturally, those lists will be looking much better for him right now.) Even aside from ‘The Brutalist’, in recent times Brody’s world seems to have opened up a little. When he renewed his focus on acting after his unannounced break (he has credited Chapman with nudging him in that direction), he began to make distinctive contributions to TV shows, most notably ‘Peaky Blinders’, ‘Succession’ and ‘Poker Face’, and renewed his ongoing relationship with Wes Anderson, now five films deep. Brody also co-wrote, produced and starred in a dark revenge movie, ‘Clean’, and wrote its music. (He has been making beats for many years.) There’s another script he’s writing, inspired by a painting he saw in Madrid’s Prado museum. And, for that matter, he wants to get back to his own painting. “I have no time to do anything at the moment, unfortunately,” he says ruefully. “Like, literally no time. I would like a little window to paint a little.”

Brody made a documentary, too, several years back: ‘Stone Barn Castle’, about the seven-year renovation of a building he owns in upstate New York. He showed the film once at the SXSW festival, but it hasn’t been seen since, and he tells me he wants to redo it sometime, change the structure and the storytelling. “I envision another iteration before it’s something to share publicly,” he explains. “But I have an enormous amount of footage.” And, like so many things, it may have already found its worth in another way.

“It’s fascinating,” he says of the documentary, “especially in context of me playing an architect, having spent a good seven years toiling away and trying to bring a building back to life and integrate all these architectural elements. And my aesthetic, which is quite unique, influenced from Eastern sources and modern things – that, too, probably informed some connection with my character.”

As he further explains the connection between the renovation and his most recent landmark character, I realise that Adrien Brody could just as much be talking about his life. And maybe that’s the point.

“The need to complete it,” he says. “And not letting it get the best of me. And all of the stuff you have to overcome to get there.”