The rise, fall and rise of an actor too good to be ignored

As Adrien Brody mounts a comeback courtesy of ambitious drama ‘The Brutalist', Louis Chilton explores why the Oscar winner endured years of cinematic Siberia after 'The Pianist'

- Louis Chilton

What might be the most significant feat of The Brutalist – and it is a film of several sizeable ones – is that it has reminded Hollywood just how good an actor Adrien Brody can be.

More than this, though: it seems to have reminded Adrien Brody, too. The man who, 22 years ago, became the youngest ever recipient of the Best Actor Oscar (at 29) for his role in the bruising Holocaust drama The Pianist (2002) is now the frontrunner for a well-deserved second. But in between these two peaks sit two decades of confounding eclecticism, a lovehate relationship with stardom that rendered Brody something of a forgotten man among cinema’s A-list.

Perhaps the most curious aspect of Brody’s comeback is just how little transformation was involved. Often, actors reinvigorate their career with a pivot into the unfamiliar: Matthew McConaughey’s canny lurch towards dramatic substance, for instance, or Liam Neeson’s late-Noughties reinvention as a gnarly stalwart of thrillers.

The Brutalist, meanwhile, seems to be exactly the sort of role that you might always have imagined for Brody: a difficult, troubled man in a sweeping and serious drama. In the film, directed by Vox Lux’s Brady Corbet, he is Laszlo Toth, an accomplished architect who emigrates to America to escape the Holocaust and finds a life of hardship, exploitation, and addiction.

Why, though, has it taken so long for Brody, now 51, to find a part like Laszlo Toth? Why did he spend much of the preceding decade making obscure, sparsely praised independent films – including several in China? In recent years, his name has been most often mentioned in queasy reminiscences of problematic faux pas: his infamous 2003 Saturday Night Live appearance, for example, in which he introduced rapper Sean Paul while wearing a dreadlocked wig and approximating an exaggerated Jamaican accent. (He recently admitted that