Adrien Brody on the price of winning an Oscar: ‘I abandoned my life’

It is a stone-cold slab of a masterpiece and I am not the first to compare the director Brady Corbet’s epic to Citizen Kane, There Will Be Blood and The Godfather. Sure, it is three and a half hours long, but the final Avengers film was barely less, and this beauty boasts an intermission and a brain. (My tip? Take snacks and don’t overcarb.) There is a terrific scene that cuts between a train carrying concrete and Brody in a synagogue that is as exhilarating as peak 1970s cinema. See it, if you have any interest in films.

“It has been called monumental,” Brody says. “And it does feel monumental – to make this in the face of the obstacles and financial limitations this business presents. This is gourmet. This is a dobos torte, which is a Hungarian cake with many layers and a caramelised topping. It is an event. A great bang for the buck.”

Yet, above all, The Brutalist makes Brody think of his mother, Sylvia Plachy, who is 81. Plachy, like Brody’s Toth, is a Jew born in Hungary in 1943, who emigrated with her parents to the US. Brody wells up – “sorry to ramble on” – as he speaks of his grandfather’s struggle to find work because of his “thick accent” and says how “very poor” his ancestors were in mid-century New York, just before Brody was born in 1973. Plachy and Brody’s father, Elliot, were guests at the Golden Globes this month, and saw their son thank them in his best actor acceptance speech.

“I witnessed my own mother’s journey, how she and her parents fled terrible circumstances only to enter a harsh new reality of being foreigners,” Brody says. “They had the obstacles of assimilation. But most of us in the US have come from such a past – second generation, third generation. So it is incongruous that there can be apathy towards people’s yearning to come over and be a contributing part of my nation. I hope this reawakens empathy for immigrants.”

I mention Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr, a tempest of a character played by Guy Pearce, and a benefactor who takes Toth under his wing for reasons both good and bad. Van Buren is the type of overlord some will think a villain, but others will aspire to be.

“He is relatable to a lot of people,” Brody says. That can’t be good: the man is a brute. “But we clearly depict the harshness of the American dream and capitalism, and how inferior the artist is often perceived to be by their patrons.”

Van Buren enables Toth’s ambition. “It’s a necessary relationship, obviously. Sometimes there are great patrons with great vision who have helped people leave behind vast bodies of work that are meaningful. But there’s a harshness to power and greed, to consuming and owning.”

I think of Harvey Weinstein, the Van Buren of Brody’s industry. Brody’s partner of the past five years is Georgina Chapman, Weinstein’s ex-wife. In his Globes speech Brody noted Chapman’s “resilience”, and said that without her he would not have been in The Brutalist, or winning awards. “There was a time not too long ago that I felt that this may never be a moment afforded to me again.”

It is striking how similar Brody looks to when he first came to fame. He is still the youngest man to win the Oscar for best actor – and if he wins again, he will become the youngest to win the award twice. Either he has not aged or he has always looked old and wise, with those big mournful eyes, jet black hair and three-times broken nose (from doing stunts), an appendage that gets its own mention in The Brutalist.

But then Brody is the A-lister who ran – fleeing Hollywood soon after his Oscar for a quiet life of self-preservation on the east coast. I always think he looks a little scared, perhaps baffled by the public side of his job, but in person, over tea, he is serious, yes, but relaxed and funny – none of which he was the last time he was in the mix for awards. Because for The Pianist he was all in. He split with a girlfriend, lost unhealthy amounts of weight and got ill. The Brutalist is a similarly intense film, but he seems well adjusted. What has changed?

“I’m a grown-up,” he says with a smile. “And as a young man I did not feel that I could faithfully honour all that was on my shoulders with The Pianist, so I dug very deep. I abandoned my life, loved ones, home, phone, car in order to deliver truth. But it’s less toxic now. I no longer think it’s necessary to torment yourself.

“And then I had never had that kind of love for my work – from anyone,” he continues, about winning his Oscar. “And it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I was young and opportunities came to me, but I didn’t want to start taking things for granted. So I shunned it. I moved. I isolated myself to live in the countryside and be in nature and to fix up an old pick-up truck and house. I saw how much was coming to me and felt unnerved.”

After The Pianist Brody played the lead in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, but in 2007 fled to upstate New York. Since then his work has been more sporadic, although he has appeared in several Wes Anderson films and was a memorable cameo in the TV series Succession as a beanie-wearing billionaire. He also got five-star reviews for his London stage debut, as a wrongly convicted prisoner in The Fear of 13.

Is he an example of how you don’t have to play the Hollywood game? Brody disagrees. “I’m pretty much outside my industry. And I like who I am – still. I’m present with people and I haven’t lost that. But I have made certain choices that weren’t the best. When I stepped out, I very much stepped out, because I always thought you could do one for them, one for you – but it doesn’t work like that.”

He means the old adage of actors taking a part in commercial work to get backing for something artistic. “If you do one for you, they don’t call. It’s simple,” he says. Maybe he thinks too much to be in blockbusters anyway.

He tells a funny story about one of his rare big-budget films, Predators, a 2010 reboot of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 sci-fi movie. Brody was meant to play a scientist, but argued that he should play the lead soldier instead, because soldiers “don’t look like Schwarzenegger” – they look like Brody. “What made my character triumph over the alien was his ability to outwit him – not his brawn,” he says seriously.

“Look,” he continues, “it wasn’t like, ‘Here’s another commercial opportunity for Adrien.’ There’s much more behind it. Still, I’ve had a big life and a vast career, which has had peaks and valleys, but I set the bar high for myself, and while I wouldn’t say stepping out was healthy for my work, it was healthy for me.”

Here, though, comes the spotlight again – and The Brutalist is political in a year when the world feels as divided as it did in 2003. Nor is Brody’s the only state-of-the-nation film up for awards. A Real Pain also tackles antisemitism, while Emilia Pérez — about a trans woman gangster – has offended both sides of the trans debate. Conclave has been denounced as “disgusting” and “anti-Catholic” by the conservative journalist Megyn Kelly, while Wicked … OK, Wicked is just Wicked.

Still, this is an invigorating time for cinema: does Brody expect a similar conflab to the one at Nicholson’s mansion, to plot protests and statements? “I don’t know,” he says, cautiously. “I don’t know how to get into that, to be honest.”

This is, after all, an era in which sticking your neck out can be unhelpful when you are in a close-run Oscar race. But more to the point, Brody is not the sort of star who’s into pronouncements and posturing. He is, instead, the quiet outsider who has just made the film of his career.

The Brutalist is in cinemas now.

Written by: Jonathan Dean

© The Times of London