Adrien Brody

Adrien Nicholas Brody (born April 14, 1973) is an American actor. Prolific in both independent films and blockbusters, he has received various accolades including two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe Award with nominations for three Primetime Emmy Awards and a Laurence Olivier Award.

Brody started his career in the early 1990s, appearing in a number of roles in his early career, including King of the Hill (1993), The Thin Red Line (1998), and Summer of Sam (1999). Brody won two Academy Awards for Best Actor for portraying Polish pianist Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski's war drama The Pianist (2002) and Hungarian brutalist architect László Tóth in Brady Corbet's period epic The Brutalist (2024); his first win, at age 29, made him the youngest winner in the category. For his performance in the latter he also won the BAFTA Award, the Critics' Choice Movie Award, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor.

His other notable films include The Village (2004), King Kong (2005), Hollywoodland (2006), Cadillac Records (2008), Splice (2009), Predators (2010), Midnight in Paris (2011), Detachment (2011), and Blonde (2022). Also a frequent collaborator of filmmaker Wes Anderson, he acted in his films The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), The French Dispatch (2021), and Asteroid City (2023).

On television, Brody has played Luca Changretta in the fourth season of the BBC series Peaky Blinders (2017), and Pat Riley in the HBO sports drama series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022–2023). He earned nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie and Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series at the Primetime Emmy Awards for his respective roles as Harry Houdini in the History Channel miniseries Houdini (2014) and investor Josh Aaronson in the HBO series Succession (2021). On stage, Brody made his London theatre debut as death row inmate Nick Yarris in the Lindsey Ferrentino play The Fear of 13 (2024), garnering a nomination for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor. In 2025, Time magazine listed him as one of the world's 100 most influential people.

Early life and education

Adrien Nicholas Brody was born on April 14, 1973, in Woodhaven, Queens, New York City, the son of Sylvia Plachy, a photographer, and Elliot Brody, a retired history professor and painter. Brody's father is of Polish Jewish descent. Brody's mother was born in Budapest, Hungary, and emigrated to the U.S. from Austria in 1958, to which she had fled with her parents following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and having lost most of her relatives to the Holocaust; she was raised Catholic, and is the daughter of a Catholic Hungarian aristocrat father and a Czech Jewish mother. Brody has said he was raised "without a strong connection" to either Judaism or Christianity.

As a child, Brody performed magic shows at children's birthday parties as "The Amazing Adrien". He attended I.S. 145 Joseph Pulitzer Middle School and Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York. He attended summer camp at Long Lake Camp for the Arts in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. Brody attended Stony Brook University before transferring to Queens College for a semester.

Career

1989–2002: Beginnings and breakthrough

Taking acting classes as a child, by age thirteen, Brody appeared in an Off-Broadway play and a PBS television film. His breakthrough came with a supporting role in Steven Soderbergh's King of the Hill (1993), a critically acclaimed drama often recognized as a pivotal moment in his early career, with both critics and Brody himself citing it as his big break. In 1996, he starred alongside Tupac Shakur and Mickey Rourke in Bullet. Brody hovered on the brink of stardom, earning an Independent Spirit Award nomination for his performance in the 1998 film Restaurant and receiving praise for his roles in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line and Spike Lee's Summer of Sam (1999).

Director Roman Polanski, impressed by Brody's work in Harrison's Flowers (2000), cast him the lead role in The Pianist (2002). To prepare for the role, Brody withdrew from public life for months, gave up his apartment and his car, and took piano lessons for four hours a day until he could master passages from some of Chopin's finest works. At 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m) tall, he lost 30 pounds (14 kg), dropping him to 130 lb (59 kg). The role won him an Academy Award for Best Actor, making him, at age twenty-nine, the youngest actor ever to win the award, and, to date, the only winner under the age of thirty. He also won a César Award for his performance. The role also earned him Best Actor nominations at the BAFTA, Golden Globes, and SAG Awards; Brody did not win any of these prizes, making him one of few actors to win an Oscar and no major precursor awards for a performance.

2003–2013: Post-The Pianist work

After The Pianist, Brody appeared in four distinctively different films. In Dummy (released in 2003, but originally shot in 2000, just prior to his work in The Pianist), he portrayed Steven Schoichet, a socially awkward aspiring ventriloquist in pursuit of a love interest (his employment counsellor, played by Vera Farmiga). He learned ventriloquism and puppetry for the role (under the tutelage of actor and ventriloquist Alan Semok) convincingly enough to perform all of the voice stunts and puppet manipulation live on set in real time, with no subsequent post dubbing. He played Noah Percy, a mentally disabled young man, in the film The Village, by M. Night Shyamalan, shell-shocked war veteran Jack Starks in The Jacket, writer Jack Driscoll in the 2005 King Kong remake, and father-to-be Peter Whitman in The Darjeeling Limited by Wes Anderson. King Kong was both a critical and box office success—it grossed $550 million worldwide, and is Brody's most successful film to date, financially. He reprised his role voicing Driscoll in the video game adaptation of the film. Additionally, Brody played a detective in Hollywoodland. He has also appeared in Diet Coke and Schweppes commercials, as well as Tori Amos' music video for "A Sorta Fairytale".

On January 5, 2006, Brody confirmed speculation that he was interested in playing the role of The Joker in 2008's The Dark Knight, and also met with director Christopher Nolan. However, Nolan and Warner Bros. decided instead to cast Heath Ledger in the role. He was also in talks with Paramount to play Spock in J. J. Abrams' Star Trek, but it ultimately went to Zachary Quinto. In 2009, he starred in Splice, a science-fiction film written and directed by Vincenzo Natali. Originally a Sundance film, Splice was adopted by Dark Castle Entertainment and distributed by Warner Bros. In 2010, he played the star role of Royce in Predators (a sequel to the original Predator), directed by Nimród Antal and produced by Robert Rodriguez.

In 2011, Brody starred in a Stella Artois beer commercial called "Crying Jean" that premiered right after half-time of Super Bowl XLV as part of Stella's "She Is a Thing of Beauty" campaign. He appeared in Woody Allen's 2011 Academy Award-winning comedy, Midnight in Paris as Salvador Dalí. On January 16, 2012, Brody made his debut as a runway model for Prada Men Fall/Winter 2012 show.

2014–present: Resurgence and expansion

In 2014, Brody collaborated again with Wes Anderson in the Academy Award-winning The Grand Budapest Hotel, where he played the villain Dmitri. He received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or in a Movie for portraying the title character in Houdini, a History Channel miniseries. The same year, Brody was cast as the title role of Lee Tamahori's action epic Emperor, about a young woman seeking revenge for the execution of her father by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, opposite Sophie Cookson. The movie was finished and screened at Cannes in 2017 but its release has been held up by legal challenges.

In 2015, he starred as Tiberius in the Chinese film Dragon Blade, which grossed $54.8 million in its opening week in China. He also received the Cinema Vanguard award at the San Diego Film Festival the same year. In 2017, it was announced that he would join the cast of the fourth season of the BBC crime drama Peaky Blinders. On August 4, 2017, he received the Leopard Club Award at the Locarno Festival. The Leopard Club Award pays homage to a major film personality whose work has made a lasting impact on the collective imagination. In 2019, Brody left Paradigm to sign with CAA Creative Artists Agency. In 2021, he received the Vanguard Award at SCAD's Savannah Film Festival.