TORONTO - Adrien Brody is kind of a serious guy.
Brody, 35, is in town at the film festival this year in The Brothers Bloom, a surreal comedy about a pair of con men and the heiress they hope to fleece. His co-stars are Mark Ruffalo and Rachel Weisz, and the movie is written and directed by Rian Johnson, the filmmaker behind Brick.
During interviews for the movie yesterday, it came up more than once that being a con artist has something in common with being an actor, in that you're pretending to be someone else.
On that topic, he says, "When I was very young, I was a magician, like from the age of six to 12. It's an evolution of that. When you're a boy, the idea of creating this illusion of a magic trick, of pulling the wool over their eyes and watching their fascination, is phenomenal. And acting, to some extent, is that. I learned about performance from that, from creating your own original routine with a simple trick -- the job of the magician is to create the patter. Which is, essentially, a con."
Brody is the only child of history professor Elliot Brody and photographer Sylvia Plachy. The arts are his background. "My father paints. My mother's an amazing photographer," he says. "That was also an influence in my becoming an actor, maybe not directly, but I grew up very comfortable being photographed. You know, I didn't have to kind of ham it up, or become mortified because my dad is going, 'Smile! Smile!' as parents do. Because once the camera comes out, you cease being yourself. And the camera was ever-present, so I think that helped immensely."
But for all the success he has experienced in his profession, it seems, for Brody, that acting can be a lonely business. Part of that is being away from home so much. He has traveled the world for his movie roles. "There is something to be said for being in a place so unfamiliar you can escape totally from yourself. You get away from routines you've had, and friends and certain peer pressure, just because you're so isolated. In that respect, it's healthy. I feel connected to the world as a result of that."
He adds, "Sometimes it's lonesome, but unfortunately, that's part of the process. Nothing's perfect. It has its advantages, too, because I've experienced so much."
From the sound of it, not everything he's experienced has been positive. Brody is thoughtful and sober in conversation, sometimes sounding downright sad. The Academy Award-winning actor has been performing since childhood, initially as a magician (The Amazing Adrien), but acting lessons also meant that as an adolescent he had already worked off-Broadway and in a TV movie. There were roles in several movies -- New York Stories, Summer of Sam, The Affair of The Necklace, Oxygen, LIberty Heights, The Thin Red Line and so on -- before he landed the lead in The Pianist, the film that would make him a household name.
When he won an Oscar at 29 for his performance in The Pianist, he was the youngest ever to win the best-actor award. Since then, he's starred in such films as The Village, Hollywoodland, The Singing Detective, The Jacket, King Kong and The Darjeeling Limited.
He says, "elements linger" of certain roles he plays. Being a working actor, "You lose friends. You can't keep in touch, it's not that you don't want to -- but you do lose good friends, because you become so immersed in something. You're on a different time schedule. You have nothing to relate to."
For The Pianist, in which he played a Holocaust survivor in Warsaw, his preparation involved isolation and extreme weight loss. Of that, he says, "I even stopped listening to pop music, to modern music. I immersed myself in classical music. I couldn't socialize then, anyway. I wasn't eating very much and I wasn't drinking, so what am I going to do ? Watch everybody else have an ice cold beer and a schnitzel? Doesn't work."
These roles, he says, are like ghosts. "But I don't feel haunted by ghosts. I feel they live among us. So I don't find it incredibly negative, even if it brings up a level of sadness in me. It's something I experienced and absorbed, somehow. In a sense, it made me more of a man, more of who I am today. I'm probably much more rounded as a result of that experience, because I respect a lot that I perhaps took for granted."
Brody will be seen in the film Cadillac Records, in which he plays Leonard Chess, and in Giallo, a thriller from Dario Argento. "That was insane. It's kind of a horror thriller. It's pretty exciting," he says, sounding more chipper. "I have tried to make my choices remain inspired by creative, rather than career, decisions. I like trying new things. I like that genre. You can't always take the high road and say, 'I'm only going to do something that appeals to the higher sense.' You sometimes have to indulge certain other fantasies."
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