Adrian Brody said in a new interview with New York Magazine that he has PTSD from starring in Roman Polanski’s 2002 biographical drama “The Pianist,” which won him the Oscar for best actor. Brody stars in the film as Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman. He prepared for the role by putting himself on a near-starvation diet in order to lose 30 pounds and bring his weight to just 129 pounds. Per the magazine, Brody “was barely drinking water by the time they started filming.”
“That was a physical transformation that was necessary for storytelling,” Brody said, looking back. “But then that kind of opened me up, spiritually, to a depth of understanding of emptiness and hunger in a way that I didn’t know, ever.”
When asked if has PTSD from the experience, Brody answered: “I do, yeah.”
“I definitely had an eating disorder for at least a year,” he added. “And then I was depressed for a year, if not a lifetime. I’m kidding, I’m kidding.”
“The Pianist” wasn’t the first time Brody did relentless prep work for a movie. As recounted by New York Magazine: “When he filmed ‘The Jacket,’ a sci-fi thriller in which he’s sent to a mental institution, he told the director to leave him in a straitjacket so he could get a feel for it. He broke his nose when someone accidentally punched him in the face during the filming of ‘Summer of Sam,’ giving him a permanent dent. For ‘Oxygen,’ in which he plays a serial killer with braces, he got actual metal ones instead of prosthetics. ‘I didn’t know how fucking painful that was until they stuck in pliers and ripped them off my teeth at the end,’ he says. For ‘Wrecked,’ he ate ants and worms (his character wakes up alone in the woods).”
Brody won the Oscar for “The Pianist” at 29 years old, making him the youngest winner in the category in Academy Award history. Around the same time, he courted controversy for hosting “Saturday Night Live” and sporting dreadlocks and a Jamaican accent to introduce musical guest Sean Paul.
“They were all literally agape from me pitching,” Brody remembered. “I think Lorne wasn’t happy with me embellishing a bit, but they allowed me to. I thought that was a safe space to do that, weirdly.”
Brody added that rumors of him being banned from “SNL” are not true to his knowledge, although: “I have never been invited back on. So I don’t know what to tell you.”
Brody is now back in the running for best actor thanks to his performance in Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” which has already won him an acting prize from the New York Film Critics Circle. The film is now playing in select theaters from A24. Head over to New York Magazine’s website to read Brody’s latest profile in its entirety.
