Adrien Brody wins second Oscar for playing Holocaust survivor again

BarcelonaAdrien Brody was 29 years old when he won the Oscar for best actor in 2003 for The pianist, the youngest performer to have ever won the award in this category. This year there was a candidate who could snatch this milestone from him. Also 29 years old, but a few months younger, Timothée Chalamet represented Brody's main competition for his more than convincing incarnation on all levels, from appearance to attitude and voice, of Bob Dylan in the film A complete unknown, by James Mangold. But, finally, the Hollywood Academy has once again cast Adrien Brody, now 51, in a role, that of the fictional architect László Tóth, in The Brutalist by Brady Corbet, which at the same time connects with, and expands on, the role he played in The pianist by Roman Polanski. With this triumph, the actor born in New York on April 14, 1973 also joins the select list of actors who have won twice in this category, which also includes Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, Tom Hanks, Jack Nich.

In addition to Chalamet, the other professionals who aspired to this same Oscar were Ralph Fiennes —third nominee after being nominated for The English Patient (1996) and, as a secondary, by Schindler's List (1993)—for the charismatic role of Vatican host in the meeting to choose a new pope in Conclave; Sebastian Stan as the young sorcerer's apprentice Donald Trump in The Apprentice; and Colman Domingo, who was already nominated last year for Rustin and in this edition he was nominated for the award for Sing Sing.

After receiving the award from the hands of the previous winner, Cillian Murphy, Brody has taken the opportunity to talk about his work as a fragile profession, even though it is often associated with glamour, because "it doesn't matter where you've gotten to in your career, everything can go down the drain." The protagonist of The brutalist seemed to speak of his own experience over the twenty-two years that separate the two Oscars. With a physique that escapes the canons of the most commercial Hollywood, the New York actor began to attract attention in the late nineties in the spheres of independent cinema. Terrence Malick recruited him in The thin red line (1998), while Spike Lee gave one of his best roles to the splendid Summer of Sam (1999), as the young punk and queer who landed in New York in the midst of the disco music boom. Even Ken Loach trusted him for his American foray, Bread and roses (2000).

Roman Polanski's hand

But it was Polanski's casting to play Władysław Szpilman, the musician who recounted his ordeal of horror and survival in Nazi-occupied Poland in an autobiographical novel brought to the big screen by the director of The Devil's Seed, which brought him international fame, as well as his first Oscar. The pianist He underwent one of those acting transformations that the Academy likes so much because of the physical challenge it entailed. He learned to play the piano, lost 15 kilos and isolated himself socially. The brutalist, Brody plays another Jewish survivor of World War II, in this case a Hungarian architect who manages to survive in the concentration camp and emigrates to the United States as soon as the conflict ends.

If in Polanski's film the character's narrative arc was focused on the war context, in Brady Corbet's film, Adrien Brody takes on the challenge of tracing the Jewish experience of trauma and diaspora beyond World War II and Europe, in an embodiment of pain. The actor has found in this role the opportunity to reaffirm his undeniable worth after an irregular career despite (or perhaps due to) winning an Oscar so young. A regular with Wes Anderson, we have been able to see him in both major productions and King Kong (2005) by Peter Jackson as well as in more personal proposals such as Blonde (2022) by Andrew Dominik, but also in a handful of rather forgettable titles. Paradigm of the actor capable of giving his body and soul to a role, hopefully this second Oscar will mean, as he himself has expressed in the extensive acceptance speech, a second opportunity to relaunch his career.