Adrien Brody

Adrien Brody (born April 14, 1973, Queens, New York, U.S.) is an American actor who won the Academy Award for best actor for his performances in The Pianist (2002) and The Brutalist (2024).

Early life and education

Brody took acting classes as a child, and he performed in experimental and Off-Broadway plays before he reached high school. He attended the Fiorello H. Laguardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and played an orphan in the 1988 television movie Home at Last, about the orphan train program. Brody made his big-screen debut in a small part in the anthology movie New York Stories (1989). He briefly attended both Stony Brook University and Queens College before moving to Los Angeles.

Summer of Sam and The Piano

Brody appeared in the independent film The Boy Who Cried Bitch (1991) and in Steven Soderbergh’s King of the Hill (1993). He took the part of a baseball player in Angels in the Outfield (1994) and starred in the unsuccessful drama Ten Benny (1995). In 1998 he was cast in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, but his part largely disappeared in editing. Brody won notice for his performance as an aspiring punk rocker in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam (1999), and he appeared in Barry Levinson’s Liberty Heights (1999) and Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses (2000).

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Oscar-Worthy Movie Trivia

In Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, based on the real-life memoir of Władysław Szpilman, Brody gave a quiet dignity to the character, an accomplished musician who initially appears nonplussed at Nazi encroachment but soon realizes the horrors of the Holocaust. His performance netted him the César Award for best actor in addition to the Oscar. Brody’s later roles included the village idiot in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004), a playwright in Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005), Leonard Chess in Cadillac Records (2008), and Salvador Dalí in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011).

The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Brutalist

Brody’s subsequent films included the World War II drama Da hong zha (2018; Air Strike) and Clean (2020); he cowrote the latter, which centers on a garbage man with a violent past. During this time Brody also appeared in a number of Wes Anderson’s films, including The Darjeeling Limited (2007), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), The French Dispatch (2021), and Asteroid City (2023). In addition, he voiced the Field Mouse in Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).

Brody later earned critical acclaim—and a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award—for his haunting performance in The Brutalist (2024), about a fictional Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor named László Toth, who moves to the United States after World War II. The saga chronicles Toth’s struggles and triumphs as he rebuilds his life and career, the latter with the help of a wealthy client (Guy Pearce).

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Television

Brody occasionally appeared on television. He starred as the title character in the miniseries Houdini (2014), and for his performance he earned an Emmy Award nomination. In 2017 Brody had a recurring role on the series Peaky Blinders. He later starred in Chapelwaite (2021), a miniseries based on Stephen King’s short story “Jerusalem’s Lot,” about a sea captain in the 1850s who returns to his family home and discovers that it may be haunted. Also in 2021 Brody earned praise—and later an Emmy nomination—for his portrayal of a billionaire investor in the TV series Succession. In the series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022–23), Brody was cast as Pat Riley, coach of the Los Angeles Lakers of the NBA.