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Adrien Brody is opening up about his experience from filming The Pianist more than two decades ago, saying he developed post-traumatic stress disorder and an eating disorder.
Brody may have won an Academy Award for his role as a Holocaust survivor in the 2003 Roman Polanski film, but the dramatic weight loss took quite a toll on the actor.
Brody revealed he went on a near-starvation diet to lose 30 pounds for the role of Wladyslaw Szpilman, dropping his weight to 129 pounds.
“That was a physical transformation that was necessary for storytelling,” he said in an interview with Vulture.
“But then that kind of opened me up, spiritually, to a depth of understanding of emptiness and hunger in a way that I didn’t know, ever.”
The star added that he “was barely drinking water by the time they started filming.”
Brody admitted he suffered long-term effects from the physical transformation, as he dealt with panic attacks, insomnia, and PTSD from the experience.
“I definitely had an eating disorder for at least a year,” he said.
“And then I was depressed for a year, if not a lifetime,” the actor said before adding, “I’m kidding, I’m kidding.”
The outlet noted how Brody goes to extreme lengths to prepare for a movie, noting how he told the director of the 2005 sci-fi thriller The Jacket, in which his character is set to a mental institution, to “leave him in a straitjacket so he could get a feel for it.”
The method actor also ate ants and worms for his portrayal of a character stranded in the woods in Wrecked, and got metal braces put in instead of having prosthetics made for his braces-wearing serial killer in Oxygen.
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“I didn’t know how f—-ing painful that was until they stuck in pliers and ripped them off my teeth at the end,” he told the outlet.
Brody’s latest work is in The Brutalist, in which he plays Hungarian-Jewish architect László Toth, who survives the Holocaust and emigrates to the U.S. with his wife to find work and rebuild their legacy.
He was awarded Best Actor by the New York Film Critics’ Circle earlier this month for the role, and nominated for a slew of other honours including a Critics Choice Award and Golden Globe.