Actor Adrian Brody

Actor Adrian Brody

LOS ANGELES - Adrien Brody is not an actor who takes the easy, pain-free options.

Brody is a method actor. A hardcore method actor.

To prepare for the New Zealand shoot of Peter Jackson's new special effects-filled epic, King Kong, Brody, with pen and paper, spent hours at Sydney's Taronga Zoo studying the idiosyncrasies of silverback gorillas.

For his 2002 Oscar-winning performance in The Pianist, playing a Jewish survivor of the Nazi invasion of Warsaw, Poland, Brody starved himself, eventually stripping 15kg from his already lean 1.87cm frame.

Before leaving for The Pianist shoot in Europe, Brody had a firesale.

He sold his New York apartment, car, mobile phone and other personal items as a way to get in a similar frame of mind as the beaten, Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman who lost everything to the Nazis.

To play a demented kidnapper in the 1999 thriller, Oxygen, Brody demanded a dentist fix real braces to his teeth.

"They wanted to give me prosthetic braces, but I said, 'No, let's get real ones'," Brody told AAP in an interview in Los Angeles.

"So for the entire movie I had braces. I never knew what braces were like and I didn't know they ripped them off with pliers at the end, but I agreed to do that."

When the 32-year-old New York-born Brody signed up for his latest film, The Jacket, with Keira Knightley, he was prepared for more pain.

In the independent thriller, he plays a soldier, Jack Starks, who returns home to Virginia suffering bouts of amnesia. He is accused of murder and locked up in an asylum and pumped with experimental hallucinogenic drugs.

Starks' medical treatment includes being taken to the asylum's basement, strapped in what looks like a straight jacket and then placed in a metal drawer.

The drawer is similar to the drawers used to store bodies at morgues.

It is hard to watch.

Physically, it must have been excruciating for Brody, but, he says, he was only doing his job.

"I'm not doing it because it's easy," Brody says.

"I think people who become an actor because they think it's easy or because they want to be famous, they're mistaken.

"Most actors make so little money they're under the poverty line. It's a misconception that it's an incredibly lucrative profession.