He was nominated for an Academy Award and was seemingly admitted to that rarefied realm reserved for our finest, most committed and possibly most berserk actors. The United States had just sent troops to Iraq, and Jack called the nominees up to his house in the Hills to talk about how they should respond. It was a shock. I'm there with Michael Caine and I'm there with Nicolas Cage and they're sipping scotch and they're smoking cigars and we're sitting around in a little circle.
Nicholson suggested that they not attend the show, in protest of the war. But I agree with you: I think that whoever is called to the stage has some responsibility to acknowledge what's going on.
And then it was. Brody hadn't expected to win—the morning of the show, he remembers sitting on the curb on Beverly Boulevard outside a diner in Hollywood, overwhelmed at the enormity of it all, while his visiting parents waited for him to collect himself. But the win wasn't dumb luck, either. He had put everything he had into the role, and the experience seemed to solidify his conviction that, with enough effort, he could embody and portray the rawest extremes of human experience.
It was insane to think he could come close to understanding the suffering of a Holocaust survivor like Szpilman, but there was a sort of euphoria in the effort of trying. He learned a simple, indelible lesson: Making great art is painful. Which is why it's also pretty much the only kind of art worth trying to make. His secret, if you could call it that, was that he wasn't always acting. They can act like they love you, and they really don't.
And it takes work for me. So he stuffed a sharp rock into his shoe. It hurt to land on, and then to walk on, too. Just do it. The audience might only catch the smallest glimpses of this—the armature of pain Brody erects beneath each character's surface. But he knows it's there. But I do often have a rock.
Even when I'm not limping. That's why I look so melancholy. I have a fucking rock under my foot. One thing Brody stresses as we walk is how unlikely this all was—how many tiny impossible things have to go right to make any movie, let alone one that sends its actor through the gauntlet of awards season and out the other side with a business card that reads Hollywood Darling. It took him a while to outgrow that expectation, and so the years that followed his Oscar win were disorienting.
No one followed me. No one started behaving strangely. No one did odd things. And then a lot of oddness happened. Don't change, people kept telling him. Don't change. So he didn't. But then they went off and changed. They talked to him differently.
Friends wanted to go into business with him. Photographers wanted to take his picture. Directors wanted him for their movies. None of it quite felt right.
For a while, he had the uniquely bad luck of appearing in a number of panned projects by particularly well-liked filmmakers. He did The Village, M. Night Shyamalan's first big wobble. Peter Jackson's big-budget remake of King Kong.
Wes Anderson's dreary The Darjeeling Limited. Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom. All logical choices, on their merits; all performances characterized by Brody's uniquely intense brand of pathos; all unlucky outcomes, by harsh Hollywood accounting.
He dreamed of getting away—of finding a place somewhere in upstate New York, the kind of house his dad would point out in the real estate listings when he was a kid. His friends Mark Ruffalo and Vera Farmiga had places away from the city, proving that escape wasn't incompatible with a Hollywood career.
He was dating the actress Elsa Pataky at the time, and he thought they could do the same thing. Brody being Brody, it was not simple. He was working on a movie in Serbia and poking around at real estate listings online when he found the Stone Barn Castle. The enormous cobblestone-and-cement home, some four hours outside New York City, featured stables for horses and even an apple orchard.
Brody was smitten. He bought it, and surprised Pataky with the purchase. They set about on a massive renovation. But the relationship ended before they could move from the guest house to the main building. It would be three or four years before Brody could move into the main house himself, so intensive was the construction. What began as an escape became an all-consuming project, equal parts distraction and balm. He traveled to India and China to find the right materials. He bought church windows and hand-hewn beams from farms in New York and Pennsylvania and Canada.
He had a team re-pointing stones for four years. Free home makeover advice from Adrien Brody: Don't worry about re-pointing stones. And then when it's all done, it looks the same.
It is a little bit neater. And then, five or six, or maybe eight, years ago, he looked up and realized that his day job wasn't getting any easier. He was still applying the maniacal effort that shot him to fame, but the work no longer seemed to repay his exertion.
There was a disconnect somehow to what I had done for so long, and it just wasn't working. He finished off the projects he was working on, and said no to the ones that came in. He grew his hair long, and started wearing a beard. He hung out with artists and started painting. He made music. He traveled the world. Eventually, he came to understand the hobbies he'd thrown himself into less as attempted diversions from acting and more as ways of buttressing his belief in his own creativity—different, and often less painful, ways to channel his energy.
Initially, our plan is to meet again the next day to talk over lunch. But as we nosh in the parking lot after our hike, we figure: Why not do this again tomorrow? We'll have to get up a bit earlier, to account for the heat, but Brody is game and so am I. Later that night, he sends along coordinates that I follow, at the next morning, to a trailhead near an eerie old abandoned zoo complex.
This time, Brody has packed a container of sliced peaches and blood orange, and brought along little oyster forks we use to spear the fruit. Almost immediately, Brody's attention is captured by a squirrel hiding in a nearby rock. He crouches, willing the creature over, and apologizes to the squirrel for not having brought food. They repeat the dance until the animal is a whisker away from Brody's hand. Brody is still putting it all out there—still giving the squirrels of the world plenty of chances to bite him—but lately things have been breaking his way.
He's in a happy relationship with the fashion designer Georgina Chapman. Because Chapman was previously married to Harvey Weinstein, Brody has again become something of a tabloid fixture.
He found his way back to Hollywood, first in bits and then all at once. He spent a while writing and then making Clean, a movie about a New York sanitation worker with a tortured past, which will be released next year. And then if you make it through, that's somewhat heroic, and that's real life, and that's what everybody faces every day. Instead, he gets to do sharply observed character work. He steals scenes, and cracks jokes. He especially loved tangling with Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong while making Succession 's third season.
I like the thrill of that. I ask if he's hit them up to pick their brains on the finer points of the executive lifestyle. I already own it! Elsewhere, he's tipping into pure comedy. In The French Dispatch, he plays a slick art dealer who recognizes, in a painter imprisoned for murder, the future of contemporary art—and, joyfully, he gets laughs.
Directed by Wes Anderson, it's the latest in a collaboration that is helping him rewrite the trajectory of his career. More than that, it seems that Anderson showed the rest of Hollywood that Brody could have fun, too. Of course, Brody still relishes the tough work. The Epix series, adapted from the Stephen King short story Jerusalem's Lot, was pure gothic horror, but Brody was nonetheless able to draw from experience: He played a man driven to insanity after coming into possession of a haunted house.
With time , Brody has gotten a little wiser about what is worth suffering for. By way of explaining this shift, he tells me a story about a movie he made more than a decade ago. Wrecked was a queasy thriller that opens moments after his character suffers amnesia and worse after crashing his car into a ravine.
Brody appears in nearly every shot, in varying degrees of agony. The shoot was brutal—the character spends the whole movie with a broken leg, which meant that Brody spent most of the production crawling on his stomach across the forest floor. After a while, he started using the backs of his hands to crawl, since his palms were stuck full of thorns.
One day, the crew was shooting by a river, and Brody noticed that the rushing water had carved this perfect little oval pool in the center of a rock. This little worm—drowning but still wriggling for the surface, fighting a battle Brody could see it was doomed to lose—filled him with emotion.
This, he knew, was why he was suffering through the shoot—this was his character in a single shot. But Wrecked was an independent feature, strapped for cash and perennially low on time.
The Good Soldier. The two eventually arrived at her cabin, where eventually embark on a sexual relationship. They expressed more intimate and sober feelings for each other. When Mathison and Nicholas become intimate, she is not frightened by the scars on her body and he has love with her, firmly and vigorously, making them both very happy.
During the night, Brody has a nightmare. He wakes up screaming "That's it! The next morning, Brody considers leaving Jessica for Carrie. After their long weekend together, Nick became suspicious of Carrie when she revealed her knowledge of her favorite tea, Yorkshire Gold.
He suspects she has been watching him and eventually discovers Carrie's gun. He confronted her and she revealed to him that she suspected he had turned against America by Abu Nazir. After giving her the gun and letting her question him about anything she wanted, he was angry that she still didn't believe in his innocence.
As he was leaving, Carrie received a phone call from Saul that revealed that Thomas Walker is alive and has also been turned. Carrie tried to fix the situation by informing Brody that she was wrong, Brody angrily rejects Carrie and goes back to her family, leaving her sad in the cabin. The Weekend. Brody and his family was invited to a party of notable people where he was treated with extreme kindness by the guests. The host expressed her interested in him replacing a disgraced Congressman.
Not long after the party, Carrie revealed to Brody that Tom Walker was still alive. Brody waited in the home of one of Abu Nazir's trusted men and informed him that he was done with Nazir for lying to him, revealing that he had in fact been tricked into working for Nazir. Not long after, he was beaten down and captured by Abu Nazir's men in the grocery store parking garage. After awakening in a room, he communicated to Nazir via video conference.
Feared dead far from at home, Brody was sold to al-Qaeda leader Abu Nazir, who converted him to the Muslim faith. They discussed the death of Issa and Brody's allegiance. Nazir ended Brody's torture in and invited him into his home, asking him to teach his son Issa English.
Brody soon grew to love the boy as his own son. In , however, Issa was killed in a drone strike while attending school. Brody helped Nazir bury Issa and joined him in reciting an Islamic prayer over the child's grave. Shortly thereafter, Brody watched an interview with Vice President William Walden Jamey Sheridan , who falsely claimed that no children were killed in the drone strike. Brody swore revenge on Walden and agreed to kill him in a suicide attack.
Nazir persuaded him to become an al-Qaeda operative. After Nazir ended the call, Brody was briefed by one of his men on his objective. Brody was to be offered to run for a political office by the Vice President, an offer which Nazir wanted him to accept. After returning home, Jessica informed Brody of a message from the Vice President's office left on the answering machine.
Not long after the message was left, Vice President Walden traveled to Brody's home to personally offer him the chance to run for United States Congress.
Brody told him that he'd have to talk about that to Jessica before deciding anything. Representative Brody. Brody talked to Jessica about the offer for a role in Congress and after she told him to not run, he decided to see Mike for help. Brody forgave Mike and thanked him for taking care of Jessica and the kids, telling him he did nothing wrong in his affair. Brody asked Mike to convince Jessica to let him run for Congress and left.
Mike visited Jessica and attempted to convince her of Brody's cause, but she realized that Brody had put him up to it and ended the conversation. Brody visited Carrie to discuss the weekend they spent together.
He made sure that she hadn't told anyone about it and asked her to promise not to, which she did. Afterwards, he bid farewell to her and left. She was upset about his reasoning for visiting her, as she had expected something more. After throwing out the wine she had prepared, she began to cry.
Later, at home after the terrorist bombing that nearly killed Carrie, Brody conversed briefly with Jessica, who she revealed that herself and their children had agreed that he should run. Brody eventually made plans to take his family to Gettysburg on a family trip. The true reason, however, for Brody to journey there, was to retrieve a suicide vest from a tailor under the employ of Nazir.
Making excuses to meet with the tailor, Brody was eventually able to try the vest on and learn how it worked. After receiving the vest, Brody placed it in the trunk of his vehicle, but was caught by Dana. As an excuse, he informed her that it was a gift for Jessica.
When the family returned home, Brody was quick to hide the vest in his room, assuming no one would go looking for it. The Vest. In a plot masterminded by Nazir, Brody set himself up to be rescued by American forces. As Walker opens fire on the summit, Brody and his targets are sent to a safe room inside the State Department. As Brody prepares to detonate the vest, however, he finds that it does not work. After he fixes it in a restroom, and as Brody was about to attempt detonation for a second time, Dana calls and asks him to promise he will come home; unbeknownst to Brody, Carrie had shown up at his house and told Dana what he was about to do.
After a brief conversation, Dana made Brody promise her to come home. After many tears and emotion, he agreed and gave his word. Brody abandoned this plan at the urging of his daughter. The door was opened and everyone was allowed to leave, securing Brody's failure. Marine One. After his failure, Brody went to retrieve his confession video. After arriving, he noticed it had been taken and a second chalk mark had been drawn.
He walked to a small drainage duct where he ran into Thomas Walker - the Marine Two - for the first time in years. Walker confronted him about failing his mission. Brody gave the excuse that the vest wouldn't detonate. Walker then revealed that Nazir was listening. Nazir then asked to speak with Brody.
Nazir asked Brody about the failure to which Brody stuck to his lie: the bomb did not explode due to a defect. He tells Nazir via phone that he plans to run for a seat in Congress, which will allow him to influence the U. And he becomes a close friend of Vice President Walden to be able to influence decisions in higher office of the United States.
Nazir agreed and asked Brody to kill Walker to prove his loyalty. Nazir told Brody to tell Walker that he wanted to speak with him privately. Brody reached the phone out to Walker, who prepared to speak to Nazir.
Brody then reached down and picked up the phone, informing Abu Nazir that he killed Walker to reassure Nazir of his loyalty. He then lowered the phone and looked back down at the corpse of Walker, staring at the lifeless friend before him. After returning home and at rest after the events of the previous week, Brody and Jessica spent time together in the kitchen where Brody expressed a sense of heightened appreciation for having his family.
He thanked Jessica as a sign of his appreciation for having her and held her in his arms. Two days later, while working on the roof of the house, Dana visited him and the two began a conversation, spending more time together as father and daughter.
After talking, Dana sat down and the two stared off into the distance together. At a meeting with Vice President Walden, Walden announced his intention to have Nick as his running mate when he runs for President, with Brody at first being shocked and then showing his gratitude for the offer. Brody later had a meeting with an ally of Abu Nazir by the name of Roya Hammad.
At the meeting, she informed Brody of her knowledge of Issa to prove his alliance with Nazir and informed him that Nazir wanted Brody to steal information from David Estes on potential targets for Nazir to attack. Returning home from work, Brody was approached by Jessica with news that Dana told her fellow students that Brody was a Muslim.
Although Dana informed them that the kids believed it to be a joke, Jessica was still angry and asked why she would say such a lie. Brody interrupted Jessica, informing her that he is a Muslim. Angered that she had been lied to by Brody, she went to the garage in search for proof of his religion and soon found his Qur'an. Angered that he shares his religion with those that held him captive for years, she throws his Quran on the floor. He quickly picks it up, only to anger her more.
Brody was hesitant at first, but during the meeting, David was forced to leave his office to meet with Roya. Brody again hesitated in Estes' office, but found the safe and opened it with the code he had received from Roya. Brody wrote the target information in a black book he had taken with him before sitting back in his seat.
When Dana admits at school that her father is a Muslim, an angered Jessica confronts Brody and throws his Quran to the floor. One night, after his Qur'an was thrown on the floor by Jessica, Brody was outside in the back yard with it.
Dana arrived and asked him what he was doing, to which he quickly replied that it had been desecrated and that he was going to bury it out of respect. Dana then began helping dig the hole to bury it in. In , Brody won a special election for the Virginia congressional seat vacated by congressman Richard Johnson. Once in office, Brody posed as a loyal Walden supporter, but used his position inside the government to assist Nazir in his plots against the United States.
Brody soon appeared at various fundraisers that featured Vice President Walden and was soon invited to a secret meeting with the Secretary of Defense, a former Marine to convince him of the urgency to provide better bombs for Israel to help fight Iran's nuclear facilities. On the day of the meeting, as Brody was ready to leave his office, Mike Faber entered before he could leave.
Brody informed him that he was on his way to the Pentagon and offered Mike a ride, where Mike expressed his suspicious regarding the death of Tom Walker. Brody informed Mike that he would investigate the matter, but as he was Tom's killer, he likely had no intention of truly keeping to his word. At the Pentagon, before their meeting with the Secretary of Defense, Vice President Walden invited Brody into a room to watch an operation that was intended to bring about the assassination of Abu Nazir.
As soon as Nazir arrived, Brody sent a secret text message, informing him of the danger. Nazir escaped before snipers could eliminate him as Brody watched, tense from the incident.
Beirut is Back. One day at his home, after kissing with his wife and being caught by Dana and Xander , Brody received a phone call. He took the call outside and soon heard the voice of Roya on the other line. She informed him that there was a problem as the Gettysburg tailor was discovered by the CIA. Roya informed Brody that he was the only one of Nazir's people that the tailor had met and asked him to move the tailor to a safe house. Angered at first and revealing that he had a fundraising appearance to make, she assured him that he would make it there on time.
He reluctantly accepted the task. He journeyed to Gettysburg and arrived at the tailor's shop, entering through the back. The tailor was shocked to see him, but Brody quickly informed him that he had been compromised and that they had to move fast so that Brody can get him to a safe house before the CIA arrests him.
On the way to the safe house, the tailor began to worry that Brody was ordered to kill him. After many occurrences including a flat tire and the tailor having Brody purchase tobacco that gave him a chance to run, Brody followed him into a wooded area. After a brief confrontation where the tailor hit Brody on the head with a rock, Brody tackled the tailor and was shocked to soon discover that the tailor had landed on a protruding branch on a log, impaling him.
During this time, Jessica had been attempting to call him. As Brody tended to the tailor's wound, Jessica called, again, with Brody answering. After a brief struggle to keep the tailor quiet and keep Jessica from hearing him, Brody snapped the tailor's neck, killing him.
He then told Jessica that he'd see her later, before hanging up. Brody buried the body of the tailor in the woods and left to a car wash where he rinsed the blood off of himself. He drove home to find Jessica and Mike in the front yard, about to enter the house.
After a brief conversation, Mike left and Brody entered the house with Jessica. Jessica informed Brody that she knew he was lying to her after he had told her excuses regarding what had happened that day.
She told him that he'd better stop lying, or she'd separate from him. Jessica went to her room, with Dana soon exiting hers and seeing Brody, before turning back and entering her room, again. State of Independence. Later, Dana helps Brody bury the desecrated Quran. Meanwhile, Berenson finds Brody's suicide tape in Beirut and gives it to Estes. Carrie is reinstated, and an operation is set up to monitor Brody's actions. Carrie received a call from Congressman Brody, asking her to meet him at a hotel bar for a drink.
She quickly accepted and met with him. After a conversation and a drink with Brody, he left to his hotel room. Peter Quinn and Saul asked Carrie to wrap it up and return to the surveillance headquarters, but she insisted that her cover was finished and that Brody had noticed that she was after him.
She went to Brody's room and told him that they had little time together, revealing that she knew he was working for Abu Nazir. After a brief confrontation with Carrie, Brody was arrested by the surveillance team. New Car Smell. After his arrest, Brody was interrogated by Quinn, Saul and Carrie.
Carrie takes over, and convinces Brody to become a triple agent for the CIA. Brody uses this as an excuse for his strange behavior to Jessica. Brody informs the team that the Gettysburg tailor is dead; Carrie and Quinn send a team to the shop to pull the surveillance and investigate it for forensics.
However, Nazir's men, led by Roya's contact, ambush the shop, killing several officers and wounding Quinn; they extract a large case from the shop. Brody denies his knowledge of the ambush to Carrie. A Gettysburg Address. Brody takes Dana to the police department to report it. Carrie stops him, stating it will affect his cover. The Clearing. Under pressure, Brody meets Hammad and says he wants out of the plot. During a tryst sexual at a hotel, Carrie convinces Brody to return to Nazir so they can prevent his next attack.
During a rendezvous with Hammad the next morning, Brody is taken away in a helicopter. In a warehouse, he is confronted by Nazir and reaffirms his loyalty as part of his cover. I'll Fly Away. Later, he receives a call from Nazir, who is holding Carrie hostage; he threatens to kill her unless Brody helps him kill Walden.
Brody goes to Walden's office and texts Nazir the serial number of Walden's pacemaker so Nazir can remotely tamper with it.
Brody then demands that Nazir let Carrie go, which he does. As Brody meets with Walden and tells him he cannot accept a place on the ticket, Nazir causes Walden's pacemaker to malfunction. Brody refuses to call an ambulance and taunts Walden as he dies. Broken Hearts. That night, after learning that Nazir has been killed, Brody leaves Jessica and reunites with Carrie.
In Memoriam. Dana finds Brody's explosive vest and asks him if he had been planning to use it; he replies that he changed his mind. He goes to Walden's funeral with Carrie, who tells him that she has decided to leave the CIA and be with him. Just then, however, a bomb hidden in Brody's car detonates and kills of the funeral's attendees, including Walden's family and many CIA agents and government officials.
Brody realizes that Nazir had planned the attack in advance of his own death and reassures Carrie that he had nothing to do with it. As she smuggles him into Canada, al-Qaeda airs his suicide tape, and he is branded as the mastermind of the attack.
At the border, Brody and Carrie tearfully part ways, with Carrie promising to clear his name. The Choice.
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