Adrien Brody was once slapped in the face by a chimpanzee. It was about 15 years ago, at the time of the release of his big ape remake, King Kong, and somebody had brought a chimp to a photoshoot. “She fell in love with me,” he says. “She would slap me in the face, laugh at my reaction and do backflips. Then slap me again. I liked it.” The actor and chimp became close. The latter refused to let anybody take her away. “I held her hand to walk her back to the car,” Brody says sadly. Did you stay in touch? “It’s terrible,” he sighs. “I swore I would but I didn’t.”
Is this how people expect Brody to be? Talking about the time he fell for a chimp? The actor is supposed to be intense. Yet here he is, not taking himself seriously at all. Maybe the reputation is unfair — look at the variety in his roles, from Roman Polanski’s harrowing Holocaust movie The Pianist to his cocky billionaire in the third series of Succession, via Wes Anderson comedies. Still, being “too f***ing heavy” is how Brody thinks people think of him, and he is right. They do.
“But it’s how the world was introduced to me,” he says. It was 2003 and, aged 29, Brody was the youngest winner in history of the Oscar for best actor. Nobody gets a second chance to make a first impression, especially when famous, and thanks to The Pianist nobody thought that he was exactly easygoing. “It’s incongruous,” he says. “I’m intensely related to the work I do but I also have intensity for things I find amusing. It’s just hard to share that when your exposure is through interviews discussing struggle. I couldn’t be talking about The Pianist and suddenly say, ‘Hey! Check out a hip-hop beat I made.’ ” He’s not joking. He makes hip-hop beats. “I couldn’t say, ‘I used to sample popcorn!’ That would have sounded bonkers.”
We sip mint tea in an upscale bistro in New York. He has just come from the shoot. No chimps, just a Tom Ford trench coat he loved. Now Brody is wearing his casuals: jeans and a Zoo York hoodie. He is striking, dark hair tumbling towards jagged cheeks and that three-times-broken nose; a brooding, chiselled 48-year-old who looks like he has just walked out of a 1950s noir detective comic where he saw some things. His eyes seem incapable of looking anything other than sad. They are his standout feature. “Even coming through customs in Spain recently with a cap on and mask up to here,” he gestures, showing only his eyes, “the guy said, ‘Adrien Brody?’ I asked how he knew. He said, ‘Not the nose! The eyes.’ ”
In Succession, the best TV series in the world, Brody played a cameo role as Josh Aaronson, a big-shot investor in a gilet and a beanie who thinks he is different to other billionaires but really is the same. In the show, about the family business empire run by Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and which of his children he will screw over next, the smarmy Aaronson holds Logan and Logan’s troubled son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) to financial ransom. The scenes are fervent and fun. “F***ing King Kong come out to dance for me,” Aaronson beams as Logan arrives, before he tries to walk the older man into a heart attack.
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He was told to take the role by his girlfriend, Georgina Chapman, a superfan of Succession and the ex-wife of Harvey Weinstein. Given that Brody is playing a “powerful guy with a big ego” there is a lot to unpick there. “I came home and told my girlfriend I’d been offered an interesting bit on Succession,” he says. “And she said, ‘I don’t care what it is, you’re doing it.’ ”
Brody must know people like Josh, whether in business or film. “Sure,” he says. “I know billionaire types and it’s not about the ego so much. It’s the power. And a sense of control.” In the past five years there has been much discussion about alpha males being on their way out. “I don’t think they’re going anywhere. Go to Cannes, you will encounter those people.” He made his first big film in the mid-1990s — what has changed from then to now? “Oh, I don’t think about it. I’m the wrong person to ask. I don’t play the game. I moved to upstate New York at the height of my career, bought an old pick-up truck and repointed my home [a sort of castle] while hiding and waiting for the phone to ring.”
This was after The Pianist; his thirties essentially. Did he feel that he needed to retreat? “I never wanted to retreat from work.” The fame then? “The fame I never clamoured for and, yes, I could retreat from the fame. And I did. I retreated from a superficiality that comes with it. Or an ease of access to things that felt inauthentic and wasn’t the path of my life growing up. It felt dishonest. I could say, ‘I like that watch!’ And they’d give it to me.” That made you uncomfortable? “I had worked my whole life in order to afford that watch. But why? It was a strange thing.”
He is relaxed now. Even if he knocks three times on the wooden table during our interview whenever it is mentioned things may be going well for him. First there is Chapman. Then his painting, which he does in his studio most nights. (“I look at my art and, without sounding too much, it asks for guidance. Is it asking for gold leaf? For blue? What is it asking for?”) But, above all, his roles have never been better. From Succession to Anderson’s The French Dispatch to another Anderson film later this year, via an imminent “dark, relevant and timely” Marilyn Monroe biopic, in which he plays a character based on the playwright Arthur Miller opposite Ana de Armas’s Norma Jean, this is the best run of his career.
Next up is Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty — a raucous show executive produced by Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice, Don’t Look Up) about the basketball team of the 1980s. Magic Johnson, money, sex. Basketball is not Britain’s favourite sport, but Brody points out that the series is “as much about basketball as Boogie Nights was about porn”. Winning Time is a lot of vulgar fun, which does not show the sleaze through a lens of our post-#MeToo concerns. It is, quite literally, tits out. Brody is Pat Riley, a pro player who was retired and bored before being called upon to coach the LA Lakers to unprecedented success.
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Brody was born in New York in 1973, the only child of Sylvia, a photographer, and Elliot, a professor. He has a sense of wonder that is almost childlike. “I’ve somehow pulled myself from obscurity in this vast world,” he smiles. “A kid from Queens, aspiring to act.” He seems dazzled still, but that can often happen to people who, like Brody, start acting when they are 12. They grow up fast but are essentially stuck in work that is about playing. “A friend sent me a photo,” he says. “I was 22 and I look like a child. I didn’t feel like a child then.”
“It’s a cruel business,” he says about getting older in the industry. “But look at Clint Eastwood. He’s beating up bad guys into his eighties. Sure, you won’t be as handsome, virile, pain-free and youthful. But life experiences work in your favour as an actor. All life. Even losing your best friend to cancer and not realising how fleeting time together is.”
The Pianist changed everything. Brody played Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jewish musician forced into the overcrowded Warsaw Ghetto. Brody was suddenly in the big league. Jack Nicholson was a fellow nominee for best actor in 2003, as were Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine and Daniel Day-Lewis, and with the ceremony being four days after the US invasion of Iraq, Nicholson called the men over to his house in the hills to discuss how to respond to the war. They had all won before apart from Brody. There was scotch and cigars and a call by Nicholson to boycott.
“I said, ‘I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going,’ ” Brody laughs. “I said, ‘I kind of have to show up. My parents are coming. This doesn’t come around too often. I know you guys are all winners. You can sit it out. But I can’t.’ ”
Well, the actor had given his all. He sold his car, disconnected his phones and gave up his home. He broke up with his girlfriend, lost a lot of weight and learnt how to play Chopin on the piano. “I can’t even watch the film,” he tells me. “I can’t. I kind of cry when I talk about it.”
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Did he have issues with his body afterwards? “I got sick from it,” he nods. “It was cumulative. I had a starvation diet, then had to gain it back. My metabolism shifted. I thought I’d experimented and lost, that my body was going to be different from now on. At the time there was an opportunity to work with Werner Herzog, but I read the script and I hadn’t recovered. My character [in Herzog’s film, eventually made as Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale] had dysentery and an ant hill on his head. He was consistently tortured. It seems silly now but I really hadn’t recovered.”
On a lighter note there is Brodyquest — a YouTube fan video which has gone viral, set to music with a cut-out of the actor grinning in front of various wondrous scenes. He jaunts past beaches and Mount Rushmore. He bursts through the sun and plays electric guitar. The lyrics go, “Adrien Brody. Adrien Brody. Adrien Brody.” At one point his face is superimposed onto Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces. Subtitled The Best Day of Adrien Brody’s Life, it has been viewed more than 11.5 million times, with Brody accounting for a few of those clicks. “Go underwater with starfish and rock out in outer space? Be on Barack and Michelle Obama’s face?” he beams. “What is not to love?”
The video is funny because Brody had always seemed like the sort of actor who would never have such fun. But, having spent a few hours with him, it now seems Brodyquest is the sort of video he would make himself. His own best day, he says, would just include being around people he loves. Maybe painting or making those beats. “Sometimes hugging children.” Dinner with his parents. And working can be good as well.
He loved being on Succession, even if Strong was not talking to Cox at the time because his Kendall had fallen out with Cox’s Logan (Strong is a method actor). The latter was mocked for a recent profile in which he discussed all that; given that Brody once ate a worm for a role, I ask if he thinks method acting is being unfairly derided. “Sure, but everything is mocked,” he shrugs. “There is no shortage of opinions and no need to inhibit yourself from sharing those opinions.”
Then Brody slaps his own face. “I might slap my face,” he says before doing just that again. Full palm planted on cheek. He is talking about work and what he does to help with his performance. “I might have a little outburst,” he explains of how he gets in the zone. Or he might slap his face. Which he does again and then one more time, before he sips mint tea and settles back in his seat, in a bistro full of people who have just watched Brody slap his own face. Like that chimpanzee did. Perhaps, I say, the chimp is still alive. They could meet again.
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Brody smiles. “It was another time.”
Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty is on Sky Atlantic and Now from March 28
Styling: Verity Parker. Grooming: Natalia Bruschi. Set design: Alice Martinelli at MHS Artists
