Adrien Brody Wins Oscar for Best Actor for ‘The Brutalist’
Twenty-two years after his first big Oscar win, “The Brutalist” star Adrien Brody picked up his second Academy Award for Best Actor on Sunday night for his work in Brady Corbet’s epic. Brody was long considered by many to be the favorite in the category, which included fellow nominees Timothée Chalamet (“A Complete Unknown”), Sebastian Stan (“The Apprentice”), Ralph Fiennes (“Conclave”), and Colman Domingo (“Sing Sing”).
Corbet was one of the first people to run up to congratulate his clearly thrilled and deeply moved star, who thanked him and partner and co-screenwriter in his speech for giving this “triumph of a work” to the actor. “Thank you, God, for this blessed life,” the winner said when he took the stage, before thanking the community for “the tremendous of outpouring that I’ve felt from this world” in regards to his work on the film.
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When Brody was nearly played off the stage by an eager orchestra, the actor was eager to continue his speech, and said to smattered applause, “I’ve done this before.” The music stopped, and Brody shared his concerns about the rise of “anti-semitism and racism and of othering” in our current world, and offered his hopes for “a happier and more inclusive world.” He ended his speech by sharing something beyond timely: “It history has taught us anything, it’s not let hate go unchecked. Let’s fight for what’s right, … let’s rebuild together.”
In the A24 film, Brody plays László Tóth, a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor (who is loosely inspired by designers Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, and Marcel Breuer) who emigrates to the United States in hopes of creating significant art and finding a better life (for both himself and his wife, played by fellow Oscar nominee Felicity Jones), only to find more pain along the way.
After its vaunted Venice Film Festival premiere last August, the 215-minute epic (including a 15-minute intermission) proved to be an awards season darling, ultimately racking up 10 Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, plus acting nods to Brody, Jones, and supporting actor Guy Pearce, as well as a slew of crafts nods.
Brody himself proved to be a standout on the campaign trail, picking up wins at the BAFTAs, the Golden Globes, and the Critics Choice Awards, plus festival accolades from the Palm Springs International Film Festival (the Desert Palm Achievement for Best Actor) and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (the Cinema Vanguard Award).
For Brody, the path to another Oscar-worthy role — let alone Oscar-winning role — has been long and winding. After his “Pianist” win in 2003, when at 29 he became the youngest actor ever to win in the Best Actor category, Brody struggled to find roles that matched that of the Holocaust epic.
Last December, he reflected to IndieWire on the experience of making the Roman Polanski movie: “It was such an awakening for me to do that movie at that relatively young age. The impact, the enormity of the pressure and responsibility for me to carry that film, 22 weeks, six days a week, to portray a man whose singular lived experience is to represent the loss of 6 million people and the horrors of that time in history, the unfathomable loss and corruption and despicable hatred and the evolution of society on my shoulders for future generations by a Holocaust survivor and the need for physical transformation.”
“The Brutalist” “begins almost where [‘The Pianist’] ended in a way,” he told IndieWire. “It is a Jewish immigrant’s journey, surviving. Those specific hardships and loss, and yearning to begin again, and the dream of coming to a place like America — where the myth of the American dream, especially in the ’50s — [offers] the hope to be free of that persecution and to somehow maybe begin again.”
He told IndieWire’s Anne Thompson that making “The Pianist” changed his life, giving him a stability and grounding that “makes me rooted every single day,” he said, “and I owe it to that experience. There is an innate understanding that I have that allows me, inhabiting a character, the depth that exists in my eyes as I tell a story of hope and dreams.”
Of his second Oscar journey, Brody added, “I appreciate the love I’ve received, and it’s taken me 22 years to receive this level of love again. That is so meaningful to me, because that’s all I do with my life. It is devoted to this work, and it’s not like I wasn’t looking for material of this caliber or a role of this magnitude.”
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