Interview: Adrien Brody (original) (raw)

Adrien Brody is not such a good actor that he can stifle his yawns. Perhaps it's the plate of scones and clotted cream he has inhaled during the course of our interview that has exhausted him. Or perhaps it's the fact he has been talking about his new film, Hollywoodland, to various journalists for two days now. Or perhaps it's me. 'I'm just tired,' he mumbles from behind his napkin, as his watery green eyes search the bar of the Dorchester hotel for the not one, but two PR people who accompanied us to the table and assured him that they would be back to pick him up within the hour.

His mood is apparent when we get into the lift down to the bar. Brody's surprisingly broad shoulders are hunched, his baseball cap pulled down so low that there are only shadows where his eyes should be and he is bemoaning the stupidity of the questions he had just been asked at a Q&A session. 'One woman wanted to know how I lost so much weight in preparation for The Pianist,' he groans. 'So I told her what I ate and she said, "So it was a protein diet," and I said, "No, it wasn't. Did you not listen when I just told you what I ate?"' As the doors ping open, I make a quick note to self: Do not, whatever you do, ask Brody how he lost all that weight (30lb) for The Pianist.

Brody can certainly be fierce when he wants to be. I make the mistake of reminding him of something he said just before the release of King Kong last year - 'I have been looking for this kind of iconic leading man guy for years, but they are hard to find.' Does he, I wonder, still feel like he's looking for those roles? 'I am a leading man,' he points out.

To be fair, he does try to be accommodating (insofar as he answers my questions), but it is obviously something that doesn't come very easily to him. He lacks the smooth-talking, soundbite suaveness that defines so many of his contemporaries. Would you like to talk about your next movie, Manolete (in which he plays legendary matador Manuel Rodriguez Sanchez), I ask at one point. 'I guess,' he says, 'but I'd rather talk about Hollywoodland.'

Right. So Hollywoodland is the first feature film from Allen Coulter, a director who made his name in television and whose credits include The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. Set in Hollywood in the Fifties, it centres around the real-life story of the death of George Reeves (played by Ben Affleck), an actor best known for his portrayal of the heroic Man of Steel on TV's Adventures of Superman. Brody plays Louis Simo, a slapdash private detective who is hired by the actor's grieving mother to prove that his death - from a single gunshot wound - was not suicide, but murder. Its film noir view of the cynical movie industry and the studio system, of the relative importance of truth versus reputation, impressed the judges at this year's Venice Film Festival (they awarded Ben Affleck the Best Actor award). But Brody's performance, true to form, is also intensely watchable; there's something behind those hangdog handsome eyes that defies you not to be drawn in.

Brody is an actor down to the tiniest tick in his cheek. It consumes him, defines him even. In the past he has been compared to a young Al Pacino - all hooked-nose, hollow-eyed intensity and commitment to his 'craft' - but he has also carved out his own, unique niche (to that Pacino comparison, he replied, 'I'm a young Adrien Brody, thanks'). The characters he plays are usually loners - isolated, complicated and often subversive. He was a bisexual punk in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam, a half-witted outcast in M Night Shyamalan's The Village and an amnesiac war veteran in John Maybury's The Jacket. But most famously of all he played Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jewish pianist who, against all the odds, clung on to life in the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War. His startling performance in Roman Polanski's The Pianist secured his place in cinema history; he became the first American actor to be awarded a Cesar (the French equivalent of an Oscar) and, at 29, knocked Richard Dreyfuss (30 when he won for The Goodbye Girl) off his post to become the youngest ever recipient of the Best Actor Academy Award.

When Brody bounded up on to the stage to receive his Oscar in 2003, he grabbed Halle Berry, who was presenting it to him, bent her backwards and kissed her passionately. 'Bet you didn't know that was in the gift bag,' he teased immediately afterwards. The following year, he played on the joke, spritzing his mouth with breath spray before presenting the Best Actress award to Charlize Theron. The same twinkling mischief twitches around the corners of Brody's mouth when I ask him where he keeps his gold statuette. 'I don't have it,' he smirks. For a moment, I glimpse the man behind the mantle. Where is it? I wonder, hoping I might have cracked him. 'I'm not going to tell you where it is,' he says, resolutely not looking me in the eye. I can practically hear the visor of his professional helmet clunk back down as he fixes me with a serious stare. 'I have it in spirit, which is all that really matters.'

The road leading to recognition was not a smooth one for Brody. Many thought the young Oscar winner had come from nowhere, but he had in fact made more than 20 films before Polanski cast him in The Pianist. He was born in Woodhaven, Queens, in 1973, the only son of Elliot Brody, a history teacher of Polish-Jewish descent and Sylvia Plachy, a Hungarian-born photojournalist. It was a creative, questioning household. A 'sensitive' young boy, Brody would often accompany his mother on assignments. Aged six, he hung around Timothy Leary's apartment while his mother photographed him for The Village Voice. As he got older, Brody fell victim to the pressures of his 'not-so-kind' environment and started to hang out with the local troublemakers who were into drag racing. Quick to spot a potential problem, his parents encouraged him to attend acting classes. 'I liked it instantly. I felt I was good at it,' Brody remembers. Enthused enough to enrol at the LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts (immoralised in Fame), he began to focus on his acting. To make money outside school hours he would put on regular performances as 'The Amazing Adrien', a magician at children's parties.

'I guess it was my gateway into acting,' he has said. 'I enjoyed creating illusions and pulling the wool over people's eyes.'

His first acting job - as an orphan in a Midwestern pioneer family in TV drama Home at Last - came when he was just 15. But his big break - as a Depression-era delinquent in Steven Soderbergh's King of the Hill - didn't come until five years later. Even after that, Brody continued to skirt around the periphery of fame for a further five years. When, in 1998, the call came from director Terrence Malick, it looked as though his fortunes had been reversed. On paper, the part of Corporal Fife in The Thin Red Line was a dream come true. He spent six months filming in the Australian outback alongside acting heroes such as Sean Penn and, just before the film's release, the birth of a new star was announced when Brody appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair. It wasn't until he went with his parents to an early screening that Brody's dream turned into a nightmare when he realised that his character had been all but totally cut out of the story. He has always been honest about how it made him feel. 'I was publically humiliated,' he remembers. 'It was a very painful, difficult experience. I was 24 years old and it sucked.'

In the past, Brody has likened the Thin Red Line experience to that of a real-life soldier. 'That movie was my experience of being at war. I'd given everything to the general and my country and, when I returned home, I was let go.' Needless to say, he will have channelled those feelings of rejection on screen. For Brody, life is a toolbox for his work; every emotion he has ever experienced is valuable by virtue of the fact that it can be used. 'I do everything in my power to feel a connection with a person that I have no connection to,' he deadpans. 'Whatever it takes.'

Little wonder, then, that Brody says he feels older than his 33 years. His commitment started relatively gently; when he was preparing to play a strike organiser in Ken Loach's Bread and Roses in 2000, he joined a janitors' union and sat in on strike talks. But by the time he landed the part in The Pianist, Brody was a full-blown Method man. Not only did he lose the aforementioned 30lb from his already lean frame in just six weeks, and learn to play Chopin, he also went to extreme measures to feel as cut off and isolated as Szpilman must have felt. He gave up life's trappings - his mobile phone, his Porsche, his long-term girlfriend. Hang on a minute, did he say girlfriend? 'I have made tremendous sacrifices in my personal life in order to dedicate myself to my work,' he concedes rather forlornly. Thankfully (and not totally surprisingly) Brody wasn't with anyone when he made The Jacket two years later. In order to enhance his performance as a man who can only piece his life together when he's undergoing brutal psychological treatment in a straitjacket in a morgue drawer, Brody would often ask to be left strapped up in the drawer even when the cameras weren't rolling.

It would be easier to dismiss Brody as a man who takes his career too seriously if it weren't for how much pleasure it seems to give him. When I ask him about his private life, his inner self, his soul, Brody freezes. His body goes rigid, his eyes dart around nervously, he shifts uncomfortably in his chair. His answers are clipped, inarticulate, incomprehensible

('I guess I do, uh, pretty much, uh, yeah, uh, feel relatively complete at this stage in my life'). But when I ask him about his work and how it feels to do what he does, he can barely contain his lyrical enthusiasm. 'When I'm playing a character, I'm being them in those moments,' he explains happily. 'It is definitely the closest thing to a real spiritual experience that I can describe. It's like I connect to the emotional state of another being that's other than my own and that is very freeing.'

Thankfully for Brody, Hollywoodland didn't involve too much tortuous preparation. Ironically, in fact, the only preparation he could do was to be unprepared. 'Adrien and I felt very strongly that Simo is a guy who doesn't really know anything at all about George Reeves's case,' director Allen Coulter explains. 'For that reason, he came at it fairly cold.' 'It was fun to play a guy like that,' Brody grins. 'I felt I knew him from my adolescent years. He's cocky, careless and playing at being cool and we've all been guilty of that.' Which isn't to say that Brody didn't give it his perfectionist all. 'He really reminds me of a finely tuned athlete,' Coulter says. 'He's like a golfer who carries on practising his swing, even when it's getting dark.'

After he won the Oscar, Brody didn't stop to pat himself on the back. He carried on practising that swing over and over. 'Of course I felt a pressure to continue doing good work,' he snaps when I suggest that it must have been a bit of a double-edged sword. 'But that's better than the pressure of never having won it, or been acknowledged.'

For what seems like forever, silence falls. I feel exhausted from the effort of trying to get him to want to talk to me and he is now doing back-to-back yawns. And then something funny happens; Brody - from nowhere - starts to talk. 'Professionally, I guess I have fulfilled a lot of my dreams,' he admits cautiously. 'But ultimately I know that that isn't what's going to make me a happy human being. I'm not less passionate about my work, but I understand that there are different things which are equally important. My priorities need to change.'

The night before our interview, Brody was photographed on the red carpet at the London Film Festival premiere of Hollywoodland with his beautiful Spanish girlfriend Elsa Pataky (a famous actor in her homeland who recently made the transatlantic leap when she starred alongside Samuel L Jackson in Snakes on a Plane). In the pictures is an entirely different Brody from the one hunched in front of me today. As he looks proudly down at the girl on his arm, he looks genuinely, hopelessly happy. Is she, I ask tentatively, his new priority? 'At this point in my life, I am much more aware of the simpler things in life and how valuable that simplicity is to me,' he replies. Which I guess is Hollywood speak for Yes.

These days, Brody is at pains to point out, he is very much 'keeping it real' when he isn't working. 'I handle a lot of my own things on my own,' he insists. 'I don't have many people doing a lot of my stuff. Obviously there are a few things I need help with, but I do my laundry and I cook dinner for my girlfriend.' How funny that he should even need to point it out. But then he lives life in that strange netherworld of Hollywood celebrity (he even has the obligatory pet chihuahua, called Ceelo). It must be hard finding who you really are when the thing you are best at is being somebody else.

Ironically, by the time his escorts come and rescue him, Brody is just warming up. He even cracks a joke at his own expense. 'I don't want to end up sitting alone in a room looking at an Oscar I don't even have any more,' he says, before laughing so explosively that it seems to surprise him even more than it does me.

But our time is up and, as we are led back to the lifts that will take Brody back up to Hollywoodland's temporary press HQ - a cluster of rooms full of posters, rows of empty tea cups and people talking in whispers - he is very much back in movie-star mode, walking several paces ahead with his head bowed against recognition. As he gets to the lift, he turns to me to say goodbye. He shakes my hand warmly, smiles even, but the real person that - just for a moment - glimmered behind those watery green eyes has gone again. Back to Hollywoodland.

· Hollywoodland opens on 24 November