Behind the rise, fall and rise again of Adrien Brody

What might be the most significant feat of The Brutalist – and it is a film of several sizeable ones – is that it has reminded Hollywood just how good an actor Adrien Brody can be. More than this, though: it seems to have reminded Adrien Brody, too. The man who, 22 years ago, became the youngest ever recipient of the Best Actor Oscar (at 29) for his role in the bruising Holocaust drama The Pianist (2002) is now the frontrunner for a well-deserved second. But in between these two peaks sit two decades of confounding eclecticism, a love-hate relationship with stardom that rendered Brody something of a forgotten man among cinema’s A-list.

Perhaps the most curious aspect of Brody’s comeback is just how little transformation was involved. Often, actors reinvigorate their career with a pivot into the unfamiliar: Matthew McConaughey’s canny lurch towards dramatic substance, for instance, or Liam Neeson’s late-Noughties reinvention as a gnarly stalwart of thrillers. The Brutalist, meanwhile, seems to be exactly the sort of role that you might always have imagined for Brody: a difficult, troubled man in a sweeping and serious drama. In the film, directed by Vox Lux’s Brady Corbet, he is László Tóth, an accomplished architect who emigrates to America to escape the Holocaust and finds a life of hardship, exploitation, and addiction.

Why, though, has it taken so long for Brody, now 51, to find a part like László Tóth? Why did he spend much of the preceding decade making obscure, sparsely praised independent films – including several in China? In recent years, his name has been most often mentioned in queasy reminiscences of problematic faux pas: his infamous 2003 Saturday Night Live appearance, for example, in which he introduced rapper Sean Paul while wearing a dreadlocked wig and approximating an exaggerated Jamaican accent. (He recently admitted that SNL producers were “literally agape” when he pitched the skit – now scrubbed from any of the show’s online material – and he hasn’t been back since.) Then there was the moment of his Oscar win, when he suddenly kissed presenter Halle Berry. (“I just thought, ‘What the f*** is happening?’” Berry later recalled.)

There’s some element of actorly self-indulgence to Brody – albeit not quite as extreme as the much-ballyhooed Method stylings of Daniel Day-Lewis, or the sombre pontifications of Succession’s Jeremy Strong. He grew up in New York, his father a retired history professor and painter, his mother a skilled photographer. “I got very comfortable having a camera present,” he later mused. As a child, Brody would return home from school and “act out people he had met”, his mother, Sylvia Plachy, recalled. “He could remember what they said and how they said it; characters from the subway and the street would emerge in our living room.” In his early roles, meanwhile, he demonstrated a flair for thespian self-urtication: during filming for Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, his nose was broken by an errant punch; Wrecked saw him eat ants and worms, for the sake of verisimilitude. For his Oscar role, as a Holocaust survivor in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, Brody lost 30lb. “I got sick from it,” he said. “It was cumulative. I had a starvation diet.”

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If it weren’t for that record-breaking Oscar win, Brody’s career would, to some extent, be defined by its near misses. One of his most famous and celebrated projects was The Thin Red Line (1998), Terrence Malick’s elegiac war drama – a film in which a young Brody was cast as the lead, but was excised from the film almost entirely in the edit. (He fared slightly better, at least, than Bill Pullman and Mickey Rourke, who were absent from the finished cut completely.) “I was always kind of grateful that The Thin Red Line was such a harrowing experience for me and full of personal loss,” he recently told GQ Hype. “There was public embarrassment and potential career disaster affiliated with all of that – I didn’t know that the role had been eviscerated. Then I looked back and I thought, ‘How lucky I am that I averted acclaim and praise at that age.’”

Another near miss arrived courtesy of Christopher Nolan, who came within a bat’s ear of casting him as the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008). It was a part that Heath Ledger elevated to seismic proportions, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in his stead – but what would Brody have looked like in that role? How would his career have gone differently? No one knows, but there’s no doubting that his trajectory would have been radically rerouted. To a lesser extent, we can say the same of the role of Spock in JJ Abrams’s Star Trek, in which he was very nearly cast (that part eventually went to the notably lower-profile Zachary Quinto).

Not that blockbusters have bypassed Brody completely, of course. His most notable big-budget project was Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005), Brody being one instance of left-brained casting in a movie that was full of it. He was compellingly rakish as screenwriter Jack Driscoll, opposite ape-magnet Naomi Watts and a huckster filmmaker played by Jack Black. The previous year, he had appeared in The Village, (ostensibly) a period piece directed by M Night Shyamalan, who was then still fizzing with his Sixth Sense cache. In 2010, he starred in Predators, a drab sequel to the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic.

Yet Brody was always something of a strange fit for the American mainstream. A glossy magazine profile once bore his image on the cover beside the words: “Adrien Brody Loves Being Famous.” But – obnoxious awards-show antics aside – this never really seemed to be the case. (“It made me look like a dick,” Brody later said of the mag cover.) It may be, too, that Brody’s very dramatic essence ran counter to conventional movie stardom: the certain, unshakeable melancholy about him. Could you really imagine him as the terse, unfeeling Mr Spock? With those eyes?

“I carved out my own window,” he later said, also acknowledging that he hadn’t “been offered the iconic leading-man roles that studios were making more of at the time, the roles that George Clooney would gravitate to”. It’s no surprise that he found his most enduring collaborator in Wes Anderson, the meticulous Texas director whose particular filmography has always been steeped in a kind of ambient spiritual sadness. Brody first worked with Anderson in the poignant oddity The Darjeeling Limited (2007), playing an expectant father touring India with his brothers (Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman). He then reunited with Anderson for smaller roles in Fantastic Mr Fox (2009), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), The French Dispatch (2021) and Asteroid City (2023) – turning in consistently strong, if slight, work throughout.

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By the 2010s, though, Brody’s work outside the Anderson puppet parade was on the wane. A small part in Woody Allen’s acclaimed Midnight in Paris (2011) offered a glimmer of hope, but then came a slew of mediocrity. The laughless 2013 sketch film Inappropriate Comedy garnered the worst reviews of Brody’s career, and a rare 0 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes. Dragon Blade (2015) was one of a few Chinese movies he made; also starring Jackie Chan and John Cusack, it was described by some media as a “propaganda film”. Action epic Emperor, directed by Lee Tamahori and screened briefly at Cannes, was never even released (a result of legal issues). In 2016, Brody stopped shooting movies altogether (though a few already in the can would dribble out over the subsequent few years), and increasingly spent his time pursuing his great artistic hobby: painting.

When he did return to films, it was with mixed results. Clean, the 2021 action thriller that he co-wrote, produced and starred in? That was a dud. Intricate Anderson triptych The French Dispatch? A definite success. He was solid, if largely forgettable, in two episodes of Succession. As recently as last year, the Brody-ometer was still oscillating wildly between flops (Ghosted, and the sadly misjudged Fool’s Paradise) and successes (Asteroid City).

It’s hard to know quite what to make, then, of Brody’s rapid acceleration to the front of this year’s Oscar pack. In one sense, it’s a testament to the quality of The Brutalist as a work of art, its undeniable scope and force. In another, it’s a sign of that storied Hollywood fickleness – the industry’s readiness to embrace a figure it showed little interest in just months prior. But maybe it’s as simple as this: when the material is right, Brody is simply too good to be ignored. Whether The Brutalist is followed by a run of acclaimed, buzzy hits, or more indies in cinematic Siberia, it doesn’t really matter – in another 20 years’ time, you’d be a fool to bet against him doing this again.

‘The Brutalist’ is in cinemas