Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist has been lobbed no shortage of compliments like “majestic,” “monumental” and “masterpiece,” to name just a few. But none of those words are surprising to star Adrien Brody who knew straight away after reading it that it was something special.
“I was so moved by it and saw such potential because the script was so beautiful. The breadth of it was so complex and nuanced,” Brody told The Hollywood Reporter at the A24 film’s recent Los Angeles premiere. “Then I met with Brady and found him to be intellectually stimulating, to say the least. That was about five and a half years ago or so at this point. But then they went in another direction with it, and the movie went away.”
Actors lose parts on the daily in Hollywood, but missing out on the chance to play László Tóth, a Jewish Hungarian architect who is attempting to rebuild his life in the United States after the Holocaust over the course of decades, was not an easy pill to swallow. “There was a long period of me connecting to the material and then mourning the loss of the material,” continued Brody, referencing how filmmakers went in a new direction with a talent package that included Joel Edgerton, Mark Rylance and Marion Cotillard. But the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted Corbet’s plans in 2021.
By the time it came back Brody’s way, he was thrilled. “I found out that I was in consideration again,” he says of the film, which eventually was shot in Hungary in 2023 with a cast that includes Felicity Jones (as Tóth’s wife Erzsébet Tóth), Alessandro Nivola (as Tóth’s cousin Attila), Guy Pearce (as the wealthy Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.), Joe Alwyn (as Harry Lee) and Isaach De Bankolé (as Tóth’s unlikely pal). “I’ve said a lot already in press about it already, but I have a lot of personal connection to this material because of my family so that gave me an innate understanding of it.”
As has been widely reported, Brody’s mother, Sylvia Plachy, and grandparents moved to New York after fleeing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Brody also previously won an Oscar for best actor for his turn as a Polish Holocaust survivor in 2002’s The Pianist, an epic that shares themes with The Brutalist. Asked how he processes challenging dramatic work these days compared to earlier in his career, the 51-year-old said not much has changed — he’s always game.
“I am very happy to work myself to exhaustion, and feel that gamut of emotions. That is very fulfilling,” said Brody, who has already received a Golden Globe and Critics Choice Association nom for his work. “It is a joy to connect to something if it has meaning. The hard thing is doing all of that work and the product not necessarily living up to your expectations of what that meant and could have meant. In this case, it’s a real triumph because we all poured in so much heart, soul, blood, sweat and tears. Brady made a film that is not only cohesive, but speaks to this whole struggle that we all have as artists to create something of lasting merit and worth, and to leave behind something of value.”
The Brutalist hits theaters on Dec. 20.
