The Brutalistis his best, most personal work sinceThe Pianist.
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Adrien Brodyhas stopped to contemplate a pile of cardboard.
Thats a great breakdancing platform.
Thats a gold mine, he says.
Its also a village.
I wait for him to explain.
That was me being very foolish and young.
Oh right, the cardboard.
On Guadalcanal, many of the residents lived in homes made from cardboard boxes.
The pile reminded him of an encounter he had with a young boy there.
He did, and they got to talking.
Brody made a commitment to pay him a few hundred dollars a year so he could go to school.
(The boy then brought his friend who wanted in on the deal.)
I forgot that story for a long time, Brody says.
Ten stories deep looking at a pile of cardboard.
He doesnt talk in sound bites.
Hes pensive and earnest and lets his thoughts go where they may, like a dog off leash.
Stories meander but return eventually.
Shes like, Youre an actor, darling.
To which he says, Its very hard unless I work to believe it.
In the years after his Oscar win, Hollywood never knew quite what to do with him.
Early on, he was compared toRobert De NiroandAl Pacino, but he never got parts like them.
(One wonders how a young Brody would have fared in this contemporary era of waifish leading men.)
He knows hes not for everyone his mien, his carriage, his seriousness.
Hes a specific man for specific tastes.
I accept what I am and who I am, he says.
He has left behind his life in Budapest, where his buildings stamp the cityscape.
Their egos meet at this point of ambition.
Toth struggles with Van Burens whims but must maintain the artist-patron relationship so you can see the project through.
Toth is Corbet is Brody is any artist attempting to create something indelibly theirs.
And as withThe Pianist,Brody could get an Oscar nomination and maybe win again.
I first meet Brody after an evening performance ofThe Fear of 13at the Donmar Warehouse in November.
Brody has changed into a gray sweater and sweatpants; his hair is still damp from a shower scene.
His agent Ben Dey is there, along with Chapman.
Brody met Chapman in 2019 through a mutual friend on a trip to Puerto Rico.
She talks me into most things, Brody says, including this play.
There was a matinee earlier, so he has been here all day.
This is my little prison, he says, pointing to the blue cot on the floor.
He usually doesnt go out, preferring to eat something from home.
After the matinee, hell meditate and take a nap.
He felt enormous pressure to pull it off.
He and the playwright, Lindsey Ferrentino, went over every line.
During rewrites, she tweaked the language to sound more like him.
The intimacy of the 251-seat black-box theater plays to Brodys strengths.
I just needed to fall apart a little, he says.
The hard thing is to get back up onstage when people are applauding.
I dont enjoy it.
Its very weird because at the end of that I just need to go away.
When hes not working, Brody lives a nomadic existence, he says.
In London, he has been living a monastic one.
When he arrived, he spent one month living in the attic apartment of the Donmars rehearsal space.
He would wake up, stretch, and head to the basement to work.
Afterward, hed go for a walk or swim, then go over his lines again.
Once the run started, he sublet an apartment in Islington.
I visit Brody there a few days later.
He comes to the door dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, holding incense.
He lights the stick of copal, balances it on a fork, and sets out some dried mango.
Theres a window slightly overhead where pedestrians flit past.
A subtle, woodsy scent fills the air.
Brody says, gazing up.
Fuck, its over.
The man has walked away; the moment is gone.
His mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, would lug five cameras around for this very reason.
Sometimes you have only a few minutes.
Its never going to be discovered.
Its never going to be something you’ve got the option to go back and reclaim.
Discipline, rigor, pain are all in service of catching the moment.
ForWrecked,he ate ants and worms (his character wakes up alone in the woods).
They shot in reverse so the film would begin with Szpilman at his most depleted.
Brody put himself on a near-starvation diet, eating small bits of protein while practicing Chopin for hours.
He lost 30 pounds, dropping to 129.
He and his girlfriend broke up.
He was barely drinking water by the time they started filming.
That was a physical transformation that was necessary for storytelling, he says.
The aftereffects were long.
He had insomnia and panic attacks.
I ask if he feels like he has PTSD from the experience.
I do, yeah, he says.
I definitely had an eating disorder for at least a year.
And then I was depressed for a year, if not a lifetime.
Im kidding, Im kidding.
As hes pulling up a photo of the GoPed on his phone, we miss our stop.
We get off and double back in the right direction.
I ask him how hes thinking about being back in the whole Oscar dog and pony show again.
Weve arrived at our destination.
Well, you asked me a zinger and then we get to the stop, he says.
I think the better question is how if it does trigger the course can I learn from my mistakes?
AfterThe Pianists debut,Brody didnt work for about a year.
I dont think it was a voluntary break, his father, Elliot Brody, tells me.
So he turned down a lot of crappy roles.
Adrien also felt the weight of expectation.
I do admit the bar was high, he says.
He began a professional relationship withWes Andersonstarting withThe Darjeeling Limitedthat continues to the present.
He didPredators,the 2010 attempt to reactivate the franchise.
I said, Look, there are many ways you’re able to go with this.
Theres an obvious way, and this is not an obvious way, he recalls writing.
If you open upTimemagazine and you see soldiers, they dont look like Schwarzenegger.
They dont look dissimilar to me.
Its about an emotional and intellectual hardness.
He convinced Rodriguez, who then convinced the executives at 20th Century Fox to say yes.
Pitching himself for Royce was an attempt to change the perception surrounding him.
(Predatorsdid fine but not well enough to green-light a sequel.)
Comedy was another area.
(The latter has a 1 out of 100 on Metacritic.)
I thought I desperately wanted to do comedic work, he says.
He entered that week with a slew of ideas, including that one.
They were all literally agape from me pitching, he says.
ButSNLgot him the costume and he did the bit during the dress rehearsal.
I think Lorne wasnt happy with me embellishing a bit, but they allowed me to, he says.
I thought that was a safe space to do that, weirdly.
There were rumors that he had been banned from the show, which to his knowledge is not true.
But I also have never been invited back on, he says, laughing.
So I dont know what to tell you.
Brody is generally much more circumspect and self-conscious about what he says now.
Hes reluctant to relive his more off-the-cuff celebrity moments.
(That year, he toldGQthat it was a big, beautiful thank-you.)
Politics is another third rail.
Brodys 2003 Oscar win came a few days after the U.S. invaded Iraq.
And lets pray for a peaceful and swift resolution.
This awards season arrives squarely during Israels ongoing bombings throughout the Middle East.
He gives a similarly diplomatic response when I ask him about the destruction in Gaza.
I am opposed to injustice and opposed to all the horrors that are around us, he says.
And I feel for people who are victimized by these things that are much bigger than us.
In the 2010s, his career miscalculations began to accumulate: His movies werent making money.
Do I like the director?
Critics would say he gave his all in a bad movie.
(Brodys engagement with the material preventsWreckedfrom falling apart, wrote Eric Kohn.)
He made a foray into the Chinese market withDragon Blade,starring alongside Jackie Chan and John Cusack.
I was not really conscious of that, and it still somehow doesnt compute.
In any film where there is an investment, they start with lists, he says.
Youre on a list or youre not on a list.
And if you do wonderful, artistic, more avant-garde work, youre way down on that list.
Not just,Did I do a shitty movie?
Somewhere along the way, Brody began to feel that erosion.
Around 2018, he took a break.
I just stepped out, he says.
That helped me recalibrate.
After he had spent a few years away, Chapman helped convince him to go back.
She told him that holing up and painting wasnt a solution, even though it might feel like one.
I was sort of haunted by our initial discussion, says Corbet.
I hadnt spoken to anyone who understood the film inside and out.
Its a pretty short list of people that have the background that Adrien has.
One reason Brody connected to the film was his mother.
Plachy was born in Budapest, where the film takes place.
Her mother was Jewish, and her father was Catholic.
Nearly all of her relatives on her mothers side died in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
The experience of doingThe Pianistfed directly into Brodys understanding of Lazslo Toth.
Chronologically, the film picks up whereThe Pianistleft off.
Lazslo has escaped the camps, but he carries the experience with him.
It was surprising to me that I didnt need to take home so much of my own anguish.
Theres a small moment in the film when Toth is eating an apple and drawing the institute hes building.
And hes like, Im not quite done drawing it yet.
It wasnt Method acting, exactly.
In December, Brody takes me to see his parents.
Being asked superficial questions like This is a precursor to the Oscars …
I dont want to even think on those terms, he says.
I just am too serious, and I know Im too serious.
His father, a retired schoolteacher who studied philosophy and social sciences, taught middle school in Jackson Heights.
Brody has his fathers nose and his mothers eyes.
On the drive, he recounts his childhood like an urban Huckleberry Finn.
He liked hanging out with the older kids.
In Forest Park, they would sled down ravines on top of car hoods.
It could also be rough.
He got jumped for having a rattail.
A kid he knew in the fourth grade got shot in the throat over a gold chain.
In retrospect, its been good for me.
But New York is a hard city.
Its made me reactive in a way I dont love but felt necessary at that time.
They fix me a coffee and show me around their house.
Framed art and photographs cover nearly every inch of the walls, including paintings by both Brody men.
His parents have been together for 62 years, and Adrien is their only child.
On the living-room mantel sits his Oscar.
Plachy pulls out photos she has taken of him over the years.
When he was a baby, she made comic strips about the funny things he would say.
She told friends she planned on eventually making a book of photos of him.
(Shes still planning on it.)
She recalls that people would tell her, Whos going to be interested in your little boy growing up?
Well, little did they know.
When he got older, hed still tag along.
They went to the World Trade Center together the day after 9/11.
He learned to be attentive by looking through her lens.
You look for things in a way that people dont look, he tells her.
You were very keyed in and present.
And I was alone with you all the time watching that.
I became very keyed in and present.
He began acting at weekend classes for kids at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts when he was 12.
He got an agent and quickly booked a couple of theater roles in the city.
How thrilling and disturbing when your own son can conjure up ghosts.
Lazslos voice was the most important part for him to get right.
He worked with a dialect coach and listened to how Hungarians from that time period spoke.
I knew when it felt truthful and when it didnt, he says.
DuringThe Fear of 13,he says, he had a keen sense of time.
He knew when the show went three minutes over.
Sometimes the intimacy is too much, and they look away.
Others will give him the energy hes looking for.
We look up at the sky together … hoping the rain will never come … and … Its not like a film, which you’ve got the option to pause and rewind.
The ephemerality is the point.
It is so fucking beautiful.
As hes speaking, I look at his parents, who are completely rapt.
Theyre his audience tonight.
Production Credits
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