Adrien Brody’s Oscar-winning roles: The common thread between The Pianist and The Brutalist

Adrien Brody is now a two-time Oscar-winning actor for his performances in The Brutalist and The Pianist. Both these roles share a common link of surviving through documented tragedies.

Brody won his first Academy Award in 2003 for his acclaimed turn in The Pianist. He was 29 at the time, which made him the youngest Oscar-winning actor till then. Nearly 20 years later, he got his second Oscar nomination for his central performance in The Brutalist. This Brady Corbet-ambitious directorial was more than three hours long and released with an intermission in the United States. Still, it won over a majority of Academy voters, leading to Brody's second victory at the L.A.-based ceremony.

Adrien Brody was up against Timothée Chalamet (A Complete Unknown), Colman Domingo (Sing Sing), Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice), and Ralph Fiennes (Conclave). The 51-year-old beat out his competitors, including SAG award-winner Chalamet. With this achievement, Adrien Brody has won every Oscar he has been nominated for. In The Brutalist and The Pianist, he played artists who survived the tragic Holocaust during the Second World War.

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What connects Adrien Brody's Oscar-winning roles in The Pianist and The Brutalist?

Adrien Brody's Oscar-winning roles in The Pianist and The Brutalist show him playing characters from a tragic part of our history. The former showed him playing a talented pianist living through the brutalities of the world war while holding on to his love for music, while the latter showed him playing a renowned architect in his quest for identity and self-expression after escaping the brutalities of the Holocaust.

The Jewish identity was central to both his characters, and so was their relationship to their art. Whether Wladyslaw Szpilman or László Tóth, Brody's characters maintained an intrinsic relationship with their artistic identity. It shaped how they saw the world and survived the atrocities. The art gave them strength and resilience and made them immortal in the grand scheme of things.

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The Pianist and The Brutalist: An inside look into Adrien Brody's intense acting process

(Video via YouTube/GQ)

Adrien Brody's two Oscar-winning roles show him in impassioned performances that reflect an intense physical and/or psychological transformation. For The Pianist, he reportedly lost 30 pounds and isolated himself to portray the emotional struggles of his deeply traumatized character. He spoke with The Talks about the extra efforts he took for this challenging role:

"You’re rarely afforded a luxury like that on The Pianist, which is time. I still didn’t have enough of that, for that matter, but I did have six weeks to do a massive physical transformation to lose the weight — because we shot in reverse. Learning to play the piano, I worked very hard on that. I don't read music, but I practiced incessantly. I shut out lots of other personal influences to just dive deeper into that space and time."

For The Brutalist, Adrien Brody looked back at his family history and channeled it as an inspiration for his performance.

"There's a very interesting parallel with the character that I play, Laszlo Toth, who is a Hungarian architect who really finds purpose and how his work and even how the works of architects of that era were really informed by the traumas of postwar of that time and how that influenced the architecture to come."

He told NPR's Tonya Mosley:

"And I feel like my mother, as an artist, and her beautiful sensitivity and empathy for others, all of that is enhanced from her own struggles and her own consciousness of the struggles of others. But she shared so much along the years with me, both stories of my grandparents and her having to say goodbye to her friends without - she was only told she was having to flee the day before they left."

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Also read: Is The Brutalist star Adrien Brody close to breaking this 65-year record?