NEW YORK -- Not that he's complaining, but Adrien Brody wants you to know that, in his case at least, winning a Best Actor Oscar has its minor downsides.

For starters, there was that surprise "dip-and-kiss" he gave Halle Berry on live TV in front of hundreds of millions of people after he won for The Pianist.

"Y'know, it was a one-off thing, and it's become a running gag," says Brody, who plays the human male love interest Jack Driscoll in Peter Jackson's megabuck FX extravaganza King Kong.

"It's not necessarily the most beautiful woman in the room. The guy who's a talk show host will want me to do it to him or they do it to me. I was asked on Access Hollywood, 'So, did you kiss King Kong like you kissed Halle?' I said, 'That's in the sequel.'"

There was also the sudden attention given to a guy who'd never attracted the interest of paparazzi. "It appeared that I was everywhere, because they took my picture everywhere I went. I'd go out and all of a sudden it looked like, man, I'm living it up, I'm a man about town.

"I think some people love the attention, and it fulfills them in some way. But it's never been my agenda."

A likely "giant ape" of a blockbuster, King Kong is unlikely to lower Brody's profile. But it does address another aspect of his Oscar win for playing a Jewish concert pianist in Roman Polanski's The Pianist. "There's this idea that I am this emaciated Polish actor. I'm serious, people come up and say where are you from, London?" (In fact, Brody, the son of photographer Sylvia Plachy, was raised in Queens, N.Y.). It's miraculous how much The Pianist was embraced by the world, by Hollywood. But it is still, I think, looked at as a foreign film.

"I think people somehow cannot get that I am an American actor. I embody America. I love cars, I love motorcycles."

So here he is as action man. Jackson's King Kong more or less follows the plot of the original with the original characters. One step ahead of the cops, scoundrel producer Carl Denham (Jack Black) fairly kidnaps his cast and crew -- including starlet Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) and scriptwriter Jack Driscoll -- and sets sail to film a legendary ape-monster on a mysterious island. The smitten Driscoll takes his life in his hands, dealing with dinosaurs, giant insects and eventually King Kong himself, en route to saving Ann and switching the scene to New York where you know what happens next.

"It is a love triangle in a way. It is also the type of role I'm attracted to, a guy who is thrust into circumstances beyond his control, out of his element and having to survive. It was very important for Peter to make New York a kind of oppressive jungle, so that Kong was out of place just like I would be in his jungle -- a young man trying to save my girlfirend from a gorilla.

"I think it proves I can hold my own in a big studio movie, and I can play a leading man without making him a stereotypical leading man. We can be sensitive human beings in this world and be tough guys too," says Brody, whose next role, in the movie Manolete, has him playing a bullfighter.

All well and good, except people may think he's Spanish.


More Artists