Back in 2003, Adrien Brody became the youngest recipient of the Best Actor award at the Academy Awards. He received the honour for his striking performance in Roman Polanski’s Holocaust war drama The Pianist. 22 years later, he’s nominated in the same category for yet another Holocaust saga, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. Adrien isn’t sure if he’ll get second time lucky, but the actor tells Hindustan Times that his role from 2002 certainly informed the portrayal of László Tóth in The Brutalist.
Same yet different
“The work I’d done as a young actor to understand the sense of history and profound loss for so many people, and the horrors of that time, really touched me deeply. I had the responsibility of telling one man’s journey that was representative of the profound loss of six million lives. Obviously, it would inform my telling of the backstory of László as he embarks on his journey of a life in America. The hopes and dreams of being a Jew in the ‘50s and fleeing from prosecution to begin again for his work to flourish,” says Adrien.
Adrien does point out that while there are parallels, The Pianist and The Brutalist make for vastly different storytelling. “But both are about the power of the human spirit to endure and the power of artistic pursuits to process, acknowledge, and represent a time in history, and how those hardships and triumphs inform the journey of the artist moving forward,” adds Adrien, for whom the immigrant struggle isn’t just Oscar bait, but a lived-in reality of his own ancestry.
Adrien’s tribute to his mother
Adrien champions The Brutalist as a tribute to his mother, Sylvia Plachy, and his grandparents, who had to flee Hungary in the ’50s during the Revolution and land in America, start again, try to assimilate, and have an accent. “Growing up in Queens, it’s not unique to my ancestral story. I’m surrounded by all walks of life. The beauty of growing up in New York is the diversity and the humanity. There’s a great deal of struggle and yarning to eke out a meaningful existence. So hardship wasn’t relegated to my personal or her personal story so to say. It’s intimate to me,” Adrien points out.
But her past struggles also shaped Sylvia as the photographer that she was. “Her journey as an artist and her yearning to leave behind some work that’s of great significance, and how her work is so intertwined with her life and is influenced by her past struggles – that’s very uniquely aligned with the journey of the character in The Brutalist. Even in the inception, Mona and Brody were very drawn to how post-war psychology deeply influenced post-war architecture. So I’m quite attuned to how harrowing life experiences inform us as artists and how their understanding of and sensitivity to the world can be enhanced from their own struggles and used for creativity,” Adrien explains.
Leaving a legacy
Adrien agrees that his mother’s journey from a migrant to a successful photographer, and the arc of his character from a Holocaust survivor to an established architect, also made him reflect on his own legacy as an actor. “What I’ve always found beautiful and important about working in film is its permanence. It’s leaving something beyond your time. If we look back at great performances and beautifully crafted films of other eras, they speak to other times, the style of work that was done, the contributions by artistic people. And if they’re meaningful, they live on beyond our years,” he says.
Adrien maintains that his yearning has been to create something significant that speaks to him, to the human condition, and that touches on social issues. He doesn’t crave to just find work that enables him to find more work. “That’s what artists yearn for – to leave behind work that is representative of a greater significance or journey. Between my mother’s influences and the influences of all the wonderful directors I’ve worked with, who auteurs, the journeyman actors I’ve collaborated with – I think we all share a similar yearning,” he adds.
Perks of acting
Another aspect of being an actor that Adrien relishes is inhabiting other people and circumstances, which entails the privilege of living on location, especially in independent films, and feeling very much a part of society and fabric of those places. He goes back to one such experience of filming Wes Anderson’s 2007 film The Darjeeling Limited in India. “I loved being in India. I look back at The Darjeeling Express as one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. I’ve been to India several times prior to and after that. But living there… we lived in Jodhpur, I hired a Royal Enfield there, so we really lived there for quite some time. It was very meaningful. I’ve actually been meaning to come back once I have some space because it was a deeply moving and enriching time in my life,” Adrien recalls, smiling.
An equally sumptuous part of being an actor is creating flawed characters sans judgement. “I don’t know if you need to like him a 100% because certain people don’t like themselves enough. And that might be an attribute of the character that you’d want to depict and embrace,” Adrien reasons, also confessing, “But I do like him. I do love his flaws and the humanity and frailty that exists. In spite of the flaws and imperfection, he’s likeable and relatable. That’s the kind of characters that I yearn to find, that are complex and representative of how complex we all are as people. You can be unpleasant at times, and be completely endearing and sensitive to others in other times. You can make great contributions to this world and have certain failings.”
The Brutalist releases in Indian cinemas on February 28.
