Adrien Brody has heard the cliched line plenty of times about how a fellow actor was “born” to play a role.
Usually those pronouncements come in the leadup to awards season, when performers are angling for critical praise as they hope to add an acting trophy to their mantlepiece.
But for Brody, when he talks so passionately about his most recent film character Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who manages to escape the terrors of the Second World War for a new life in America, he means it.
“I feel like if there was a role that one actor is specifically right for, this was it,” Brody, 51, says, speaking about his acclaimed work in The Brutalist in a virtual interview from New York City. ” I don’t know who else could have fit the shoes quite as well as I do.”
He wasn’t the first choice to play Laszlo. Actor Joel Edgerton had been cast in the role, but was forced to drop out over scheduling conflicts. When the part came back around to Brody, it was a bit of serendipitous timing.
Brody’s grandparents and his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, fled Budapest in 1956 during the Hungarian revolution and left everything behind to emigrate to the U.S., he explains. “Their journey was very hard,” he adds, softly. “So it’s very personal … There was a specificity to this character that I understood and I was able to find because of my family history.”
The sweeping epic — which has a running time of nearly four hours, including an intermission — won Brody a best actor prize at the Golden Globes earlier this month. The Brutalist also nabbed best picture and best director for Brady Corbet. This week, the film snagged nine nominations from the British Academy Film Awards, including leading actor for Brody.
Spanning decades, the film follows Laszlo as he tries to craft a new future for himself and his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) as he works for a power-hungry industrialist (Guy Pearce) who hires him to design a monumental community centre in rural Pennsylvania.
To tell his story, Corbet dusted off VistaVision, a cinematic format developed 70 years ago that yields a richer, more luxurious image. It was a technique embraced by filmmakers like the late Stanley Kubrick, but it hasn’t been seen in North American theatres in over 60 years.
“It’s a real event to get to sit in a movie theatre and see something crafted with this kind of texture,” Brody says. “It’s a very expansive image and very vivid.”
Brody goes on to enthusiastically describe Corbet’s arduous process to create a picture that evoked “another era.” He gleefully explains Corbet’s techniques, telling me at one point that they obtained lenses that were once owned by Kubrick to shoot the film.
“It was an enormous undertaking, especially with a modest budget and Brady managed to make it happen. I’ve had other filmmaker friends who have spoken to me about making films in this way and they’ve been deterred, but Brady did it and really created such a unique look,” Brody says.
“Its immense field of view is ideal for capturing the immensity of Brutalist architecture,” Corbet tells Postmedia.
When the Academy Award nominations are announced later this week, The Brutalist is expected to feature in all the major categories. The accolades are nice, but Brody is more thrilled to be part of a story that has captivated moviegoers.
“I’m so grateful this came my way and I’m so grateful that a filmmaker like Brady Corbet is getting his moment to shine and that I was instrumental in getting that dream — that seven-year dream between him and Mona Fastvold, his wife and writing partner — to help that come to fruition,” Brody says.
Even though the story of Laszlo is fictional, Brody, whose father is Polish Jewish and mother is Hungarian, found an intense personal connection to the character’s dogged hopes and dreams.
“It speaks to my own family’s journey as immigrants coming to (America) and the hardships of many and the suffering of the past and finding purpose through art and the yearning of artists to leave behind something meaningful that outlives themselves,” he says. “That’s something we all strive to do with our work in film.”
For Corbet, Brody’s “heritage and family history made him ideal for the role,” the director says. What’s more, “his unwavering dedication and preparedness were bar none.”
Before landing his first Oscar-winning role at the age of 29 when he was cast as real-life composer Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, Brody had worked with some of Hollywood’s most revered filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese (in his 1989 film debut in New York Stories), Spike Lee (Summer of Sam) and Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line).
After his star-making role in The Pianist, he appeared in Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake and became one of Wes Anderson’s featured players (appearing in The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Asteroid City). There were also roles in Succession and Peaky Blinders.
There were other movies that came and went without notice. Twenty-two years after his first win, another Academy Award nomination would cement his return to serious acting. Movie Star status once again. So the role of Laszlo, and his ambitious struggles, towering successes and bitter failures have in some ways been a mirror for Brody’s own work as an actor.
“Beyond being right for a role, I feel more blessed that Brady and I intersected,” he says. “That I’ve been able to receive recognition from people that know film and love film and appreciate it, and the people in my industry who are yearning to tell stories of this magnitude … I’m just so grateful.”
The Brutalist is now playing in select theatres. It opens across Canada on Jan. 24.