Adrien Brody never looked like a leading man.
Casting agents and executives made that message clear over and over again throughout his three-plus decades as a working actor. “Overtly,” Brody, 51, says. “But, yeah, it was often told to my representatives, and my representatives would shar
Alexi Lubomirski for Variety
While a few directors came calling with the occasional studio lead role, like Peter Jackson for his $200 million 2005 tentpole “King Kong” and Nimród Antal for the 2010 “Predators” sequel, those were the exceptions. Yes, he’s booked five movies with Wes Anderson since joining the director’s repertory company in 2007’s “The Darjeeling Limited,” but other major roles have eluded him, even while peers such as Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Leonardo DiCaprio never lacked access to better material. Being overlooked was a familiar scenario for Brody: As a teen, he struggled to follow up his debut as the star of the PBS movie “Home at Last,” and the repeated rejections stung.
It’s undeniable that Brody doesn’t conform. When I meet him at the bar at the Soho Grand Hotel in New York on a January morning, his reed-thin frame is obscured by a sweeping black cape coat, and his sharp, angular face precedes him as he enters the room. He is more Cyrano than Christian. But his looks may be a blessing. While his contemporaries landed billion-dollar franchises, Brody got to do far more compelling work. As Wladyslaw Szpilman in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” he evoked the trauma and pain of a Jewish Pole living through the Holocaust. And, after decades spent somewhat in the wilderness, Brody has found his way to another career-defining part as László Tóth in Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” a film whose ambitious and epic scope (clocking in at 3 hours and 35 minutes) somehow defies its impossibly low budget of $10 million.
In “The Brutalist,” Brody once again plumbs the legacy of the Holocaust; this time, he plays a survivor who makes his way to the U.S. to kick-start his dream of building titanic structures in a bid to express his sensibility and process his grief. Never quite welcome in his adopted land, László succumbs to heroin addiction and endures sexual assault. Now, Brody is back in awards contention for the first time in 22 years and dominating the conversation (racking up a Golden Globe and a New York Film Critics Circle Award along the way). Should he take home a second best actor Academy Award, he’ll join an exclusive club that includes Fredric March, Spencer Tracy, Marlon Brando, Gary Cooper, Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks, Anthony Hopkins, Dustin Hoffman and Sean Penn. (Daniel Day-Lewis has won three.) Not bad for a guy the industry never knew what to do with.
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“Adrien has a face that is from another era,” his friend Scarlett Johansson says. “He has such pathos in his face. It’s a face that’s made for a close up. Such expressive eyes — and some of his features are so exaggerated and yet delicate.”
But then, only an actor who doesn’t quite fit in could have brought László to life with his ungainly, spirited passion, vanity and self-belief intact. For his part, Brody finds solace in all the times he was passed over. “I’d much rather be known as a great actor than a great-looking actor,” he says.
The first time I sit down with Brody for this profile is all the way back on May 22, 2023, in an Italian restaurant in Cannes, where he is promoting the Wes Anderson film “Asteroid City.” Wearing a bone gray button-down jacket and a sweater, the actor looks ready for the chill of a Budapest winter rather than the relentless Côte d’Azur sun. Brody’s head — and body — are still in Hungary.
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Only days earlier, “The Brutalist” wrapped production, leaving him a sliver of time to jet back to his castle in upstate New York. (“Architectural relic,” he corrects me. “A barn that looks like a castle.” Nevertheless, the property was once featured in a 30-page magazine spread in “Hello!”) Brody barely had time to visit his parents in Queens and whisk his girlfriend, Georgina Chapman, to the medieval French village of Èze, where he’s staying with the rest of the “Asteroid City” team. This pace is wearying but welcome too; in the years after his Oscar win, Brody saw the sexy roles go to others.
“That’s par for the course,” he says. “I definitely can admit I’m not the typical-looking person, so that will either work in your favor sometimes and often not work in your favor.”
In our first meeting, Brody tells me that he’s exhausted but feeling good. His body indicates otherwise as he folds a napkin repeatedly and fidgets with a sugar packet that he never opens. His long fingers — the ones that deserved a credit of their own in “The Pianist” — shake slightly as he takes a sip of mint tea. Over our two hours, he ignores the cookies laid before us, never even takes a sip of water. He barely touches the tea. (While he quit caffeine during production, he’s since fallen off that wagon; he admits to having gulped down two green teas before our conversation.)
Alexi Lubomirski for Variety
“I kind of experiment with my willpower, I guess,” he notes. “I’ll abstain from something that gives me comfort to kind of destabilize the norm. It’s not easy to shoot an epic movie in a relatively short period of time with night shoots and everything — and not have one sip of caffeine.”
The feat might have been like cramming in a master’s degree in a single semester without the help of a stimulant. Then again, he simply didn’t have the stomach for caffeine. On the second day of production on “The Brutalist,” Brody fell ill. Corbet and others in the cast and crew also succumbed; Corbet’s assistant had to follow him around with an IV bag hung on a clothes hanger.
“The first week for us was by far the most challenging,” Corbet recalls. “I think it really brought Adrien and I very, very close together. We were very much in a lockstep because we were immediately thrown into the thick of it. Facing those sorts of conflicts together can be very, very bonding.”
Back in Cannes, Brody has no idea what “The Brutalist” will become. Eighteen months after this first meeting, the A24 drama goes on to land 10 Oscar nominations, including best picture and best director for Corbet. All he knows is that it was hard work. Brody grows most animated when talking about the grueling, truncated 34-day shoot, stabbing the air for emphasis.
“There was just no room for error,” he says. “And it’s so hard to make magic when you’re up against it all the time, and your filmmaker’s up against it all the time. It just adds so much pressure. Just debilitatingly exhausting. It’s just really excruciating, but worth the sacrifice.”
The sacrifice included giving up personal time with his partner — but Brody grows uncomfortable when asked about Chapman, the Marchesa fashion designer. (She was married to now disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein from 2007 until their divorce was finalized in 2021, following his rape conviction in New York.) “I’m not going to delve into it, so let’s skip it,” he says. Questions about third-rail topics — like his work with Polanski, an auteur who is a fugitive from justice for his 1970s conviction for statutory rape — are met with an “It’s not important.”
But it’s worth repeating the question: How does it feel that the greatest accomplishment of his acting career is inextricably linked to a director who’s been erased from Hollywood?
It’s a bit of a word salad, put forth with the seeming purpose of evading the topic. Polanski’s name doesn’t even cross Brody’s lips. But then, a question like this is a no-win situation for an actor who’s already seen how rapidly one’s reputation can take a hit. His impromptu kiss of Halle Berry on the Academy stage after she presented his best actor trophy was described at the time as “swooningly smooth” in USA Today but has since come to be seen as an inappropriate invasion.
Regarding that moment, he says: “We live in a very conscious time, which is a wonderful thing. And nothing that I ever do or have done or would’ve done is ever done with the intention of making anyone feel bad.” Two months after his Oscar win, he improvised a brief performance in dreadlocks and a faux Jamaican accent as host of “Saturday Night Live.” (He’s never been invited back.) Coincidentally or not, the clip resurfaced on social media this year with accusations of cultural appropriation as Brody’s frontrunner position solidified.
Alexi Lubomirski for Variety
With Chapman, Brody seems frustrated by the level of attention that accompanies their coupledom. “We got photographed leaving the plane here,” he says, his voice suddenly low and soft. “We get photographed leaving the hotel. We get photographed every minute.”
By the time we meet at the Soho Grand nearly two years later, he’s no longer keeping the relationship entirely private. The two have been spotted together all awards season, even holding hands as they wandered the canals of Venice, where “The Brutalist” premiered last September. Indeed, Brody shares with me an unexpected portrait of rural bliss — having ditched his New York City digs, he is building a bucolic life with Chapman, her two children and a fledgling Noah’s ark.
