MAN ON WIRE

ADRIEN BRODY IS DRAWN TO HIGH-RISK ROLES AND FILMS THAT PUSH HIM TO EXTREMES. NOTHING HE'S DONE COMPARES TO THE BRUTALIST.

- WENDELL STEAVENSON

Adrien Brody was just 29 when he won the best-actor Oscar for The Pianist, Roman Polanski's haunting film set in the Warsaw Ghetto. He was the youngest ever recipient, a record that still stands. The immersive effort of preparing for the role, moving out of his New York apartment, avoiding friends, and starving himself to understand loss and isolation, left him depressed and exhausted. He did not work for a year afterward. The next role he took was a developmentally disabled murderous boy in M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, a gothic tale of monsters in the woods; hardly leading-man material.

"I accepted that role without my agents even reading the script," Brody told me with a wry expression. "Night didn't want anyone to read it, so I honored his request." Brody had come up working with directors like Spike Lee, Ken Loach, Barry Levinson, Steven Soderbergh, and Terrence Malick, and he wanted more of the same: interesting roles, collaborations with great artists. "I didn't want to say: Okay, now I'm only looking for an overtly heroic character. I wanted to have a creative journey. But that is the problem."

It's a choice that has led to a career that can look, at superficial glance, like a slide after an early peak. But the optics are misleading. To date, Brody has made almost 60 movies playing a multiverse of characters, from punk rocker to ventriloquist to bull fighter to Roman general; he's played Arthur Miller, Houdini, and a wonderfully whimsical Salvador Dalí in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. He has defied genre and typecasting, headlining big action movies like Peter Jackson's King Kong and the Predators reboot; done sci-fi, thrillers, and horror; and become a recurring member of Wes Anderson's film troupe. Some of his movies are critically acclaimed; plenty have bombed, but his performances are never less than wholly committed.