Adrien Brody Used the ‘Rejection’ His Grandfather Faced to Shape His Performance in ‘The Brutalist’

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All performers use some part of their own reality to shape the characters they inhabit, but for “The Brutalist,” Adrien Brody had more than most to work off of. The film follows fictional Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth as he immigrates to America with the hopes of re-starting his life and practicing his craft. Having grown up amongst immigrant parents and grandparents from Hungary and Poland, Brody was all-too familiar with not only the broad difficulties this experience entails, but the specific hardships, both physical and emotional, faced along the way.

For the most recent episode of “The A24 Podcast,” Brody sat down with his “The Darjeeling Limited” costar Jason Schwartzman and detailed these challenges, sharing how his maternal grandfather helped shaped elements of his character in “The Brutalist.”

“My mother has a recording — I don’t know if she recorded it or my grandfather had recorded it — but I remember him trying to get work,” he said. “He aspired to be an actor too, but he was trying to get work and he had a recording of this and I’ve heard this recording and he sounds even more extreme than László’s accent. He would introduce himself — my mother’s maiden name is Plachy — and he would say ‘Plachy’ and say it again and ‘I would like to apply for the job.’ Then you could hear the pause on the other end of the line and he would say, ‘Yes, oh okay, thank you, thank you,’ and you could hear the rejection and he’d call again, someone else, and I really remember what a struggle it was.”

Brody went on to describe his grandfather as “very charismatic” and “handsome,” so the fact that his voice served as deterrent to his success was very impactful. Not only this, but his grandfather’s presence still remains with the actor largely because of how special Brody found the way he spoke.

“We were such a close family. My mom was an only child, I’m an only child, my grandparents were it from the old world. Maybe because they sounded so distinctly different, it struck me even more than anybody else,” Brody told Schwartzman. “Nobody sounded like them; Nobody was Hungarian. So to be able to have that as a kind of guiding light in [‘The Brutalist’], it’s really special. And to represent that, because I feel like that is such a universal thing — there’s so many people from whatever background — we’re all the descendants of immigrants. There’s been a lot of struggle. No matter how you cut it, no matter who it is; There’s a lot of sacrifice.”

Changing the dialogue from what was originally written, Brody found a way to pay homage to his grandfather in one scene by struggling with his words. During a pivotal moment when Tóth is presenting the model for his design to the town in which it will be built upon, he calls on an assistant to hand him a flashlight, but instead, calls it a torch.

“I added that because my grandfather would have a hard time remembering the English word for things,” said Brody, “and he would say, ‘What is that, what is the word for the — Yes, what is that?’ and I did that to honor him.”

Watch Brody and Schwartzman’s full interview on “The A24 Podcast” below.