Adrien Brody

Adrien Brody (birthname: Adrien Nicholas Brody) has enjoyed a varied and notably international career as an American actor and is the only one to have won both the Best Actor Oscar and César awards, as well as a Best European Actor nominee for European Film Awards.

Brody has worked with some of the world’s most acclaimed (and sometimes also disgraced) filmmakers, including Terrence Malick, Spike Lee, Roman Polanski, Steven Soderbergh, Francis Ford Coppola, Wes Anderson (with whom he is part of a regular company), Woody Allen, and Dario Argento.

Indeed, Adrien Brody’s first big-screen director was Coppola, on his segment titled Life Without Zoë for the anthology film New York Stories (1989), with Talia Shire, Giancarlo Giannini, and Carole Bouquet. Brody was cast in a supporting role for Soderbergh’s praised Depression-era drama, King of the Hill (1993), Jeroen Krabbe, Lisa Eichhorn, Karen Allen, Spalding Gray, and Elizabeth McGovern.

The first box-office hit with which Brody was associated was Disney’s remake of the 1951 movie, Angels in the Outfield (1994), with Danny Glover, Tony Danza, and Ben Johnson, while featuring future stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Matthew McConaughey, and earning over $50 million. Adrien Brody had a more substantial role in Julien Temple’s crime drama, Bullet (1996), one of the few movies starring late rapper superstar Tupac Shakur and star/co-writer Mickey Rourke, with Peter Dinklage, Michael K. Williams, and Donnie Wahlberg.

An overlooked movie in Brody’s filmography is writer-director Stephen T. Kay’s The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997), based on letters written by Neal Cassady (played by Thomas Jane) to Jack Kerouac, and co-starring Keanu Reeves, Claire Forlani, rocker musician John Doe, and Gretchen Mol.

Adrien Brody received his first significant award consideration (a Best Male Lead nomination from the Independent Spirit Awards) for his first starring role in the Eric Bross/Tom Cudworth indie comedy, Restaurant (1998) with Lauryn Hill, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, and Simon Baker.

One of Brody’s first important appearances was in the ensemble of Terrence Malick’s WWII drama based on James Jones’ novel, The Thin Red Line (1998), with a remarkable cast including Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly, and John Travolta. Brody returned to his New York City roots for Spike Lee’s disturbing account of the Son of Sam case, Summer of Sam (1999), with John Leguizamo, Mira Sorvino, Anthony LaPaglia, Roger Guenveur Smith, and Ben Gazzara.

Adrien Brody starred in writer-director Barry Levinson’s fourth film in his “Baltimore Tetralogy,” Liberty Heights (1999), with Bebe Neuwirth and Joe Mantegna, followed by Brody’s first of several movies made with European filmmakers—Ken Loach’s U.S.-based drama, Bread & Roses (2000), with Pilar Padilla and Elpidia Carrillo, which competed at the Cannes Film Festival.

Another film co-starring Brody that premiered on the major festival circuit (in this case, San Sebastian) was Elie Chouraqui’s war drama Harrison’s Flowers (2000), with Andie MacDowell, Elias Koteas, Brendan Gleeson, and David Strathairn. Brody made a rare turn to period drama in a supporting role in the 18th-century drama, The Affair of the Necklace (2001), with Hilary Swank, Jonathan Pryce, Simon Baker, Joely Richarson, and Christopher Walken.

The triumph (so far) of Adrien Brody’s career is unquestionably his brilliant performance as Wladyslaw Szpilman in Roman Polanski’s universally acclaimed WWII drama, The Pianist (2002), with Brody winning or being nominated for just about every best actor award in sight, including an Oscar win for Best Actor (one of three, including Oscars for director Polanski and screenwriter Ronald Harwood).

Brody took a mere supporting role in an Americanized version of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (2003) with Robert Downey Jr., Robin Wright Penn, and Mel Gibson. M. Night Shyamalan’s typically twisty The Village (2004) was Adrien Brody’s next assignment, co-starring with Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, and Brendan Gleeson. Brody next worked with the exciting director John Maybury on the psycho-drama, The Jacket (2005), co-produced by George Clooney, Peter Guber, and Steven Soderbergh, and co-starring Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Daniel Craig, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Kelly Lynch. One of Brody’s biggest-grossing movies is Peter Jackson’s version of King Kong (2005), with Naomi Watts, Jack Black, and Andy Serkis, earning a worldwide combined theatrical and home video gross of over $700 million.

Brody starred in The Sopranos veteran director Allen Coulter’s feature debut, Hollywoodland (2006), co-starring Ben Affleck, Diane Lane, and Bob Hoskins, followed by his first venture with Wes Anderson in a co-starring slot with Owen Wilson and Jason Schwarzman in The Darjeeling Limited (2007). For writer-director Rian Johnson, Adrien Brody joined the crime caper movie, The Brothers Bloom (2008) ensemble with Rachel Weisz, Mark Ruffalo, Rinko Kikuchi, Maximilian Schell, and Robbie Coltrane. Writer-director Darnell Martin’s music industry biopic, Cadillac Records (2008), starred Brody opposite Jeffrey Wright, Gabrielle Union, Cedric the Entertainer, Mos Def, and Beyoncé.

Brody’s first project as star-producer was Dario Argento’s horror film, Giallo (2009), co-starring Emmanuelle Seigner, which turned out to be infamous since Argento disowned the film after producers took it over, and Brody had to sue the film’s owners to be paid for his services.

Brody recovered with a successful venture into horror with another Italian filmmaker, writer-director Vincenzo Natali, with Splice (2009), co-starring Sarah Polley. Adrien Brody’s second Wes Anderson collaboration was one of Anderson’s finest achievements, the stop-motion animated wonder Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), led by the voice of George Clooney. The Robert Rodriguez-produced Predators (2010), the third entry in the Predator franchise, was Brody’s rare foray into high-concept action, with co-stars Topher Grace, Walton Goggins, and Laurence Fishburne.

That same year, Brody topped the cast of Paul T. Scheuring’s The Experiment, fictionalizing the controversial 1971 Stanford prison experiment, co-starring Forest Whitaker, Clifton Collins, Jr., and Fisher Stevens. Brody served as executive producer and star on two back-to-back projects: the adventure thriller, Wrecked (2010) and Tony Kaye’s Detachment (2011), premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival and with Marcia Gay Harden, Bryan Cranston, Tim Blake Nelson, Lucy Liu, and James Caan.

Adrien Brody and his fellow actors received a lot of love—in the form of awards-season nominations, including the Screen Actors Guild—for one of Woody Allen’s last bona fide hits, Midnight in Paris (2011), in which Brody portrays Salvador Dali alongside Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard, and Michael Sheen. Brody was one of the first Hollywood stars to participate in the new wave of commercial, big-budget Mainland Chinese productions, in this case, Feng Xiaogang’s historical epic, Back to 1942 (2012), with co-star Tim Robbins, Albert Yeung, and Peter Lam.

With co-stars Liam Neeson, Mila Kunis, Olivia Wilde, and James Franco, Brody worked with writer-director Paul Haggis on the romantic drama Third Person (2013). Continuing his run with Wes Anderson, Adrien Brody again co-starred in the well-reviewed comedy, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) with Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Mathieu Almaric, Willem Dafoe, Jude Law, and Saoirse Ronan. Brody’s next Chinese mega-production was opposite Jackie Chan in writer-director Daniel Lee’s lavish Dragon Blade (2015).

Taking a break from acting, Brody directed, produced, and wrote the music for the documentary Stone Barn Castle (2015) about his restoration of a large, dilapidated stone barn in upstate New York. Brody was picked to head the cast of the Iranian hostage drama Septembers of Shiraz (2015) with Salma Hayek and Shohreh Aghdashloo, followed by a few crime movies, including Manhattan Night (2016), which Brody also produced; Paul Solet’s U.S.-Bulgarian co-production, Bullet Head (2017), with Antonio Banderas and John Malkovich, as well as another Solet film which Brody co-wrote, produced and composed the score, Clean (2021), with Mykelti Williamson and RZA.

Adrien Brody delivered a comical performance in his fourth Wes Anderson collaboration, The French Dispatch (2021), with Benicio del Toro, Tilda Swinton, and Jeffrey Wright, among many others. Brody joined the crime comedy antics of Searchlight Pictures’ See How They Run (2022) opposite Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, Ruth Wilson, and David Oyelowo. However, Brody’s most significant role in a while arrived in the form of Andrew Dominik’s highly anticipated adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s masterwork, Blonde (2022), with Brody portraying Arthur Miller opposite Ana de Armas’ Marilyn Monroe.

Reuniting once again with Wes Anderson for the comedy Asteroid City (date to be announced), Adrien Brody joined a massive cast including Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Margot Robbie, Rupert Friend, Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Bryan Cranston, Hope Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Jeffrey Wright, Live Schreiber, Matt Dillon, Edward Norton, Steve Carell, Willem Dafoe, and Rita Wilson. Brody reunited with de Armas for the romantic action-adventure film, Ghosted (date to be announced), co-starring Chris Evans. Amy Sedaris, Tim Blake Nelson, and Tate Donovan.