Adrien Brody on developing PTSD, eating disorder from method acting role

Adrien Brody took on a near-starvation diet to prepare himself for his role in The Pianist. Photo / Getty Images

Hollywood star Adrien Brody has finally opened up about his gruelling experience starring in Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning 2002 film The Pianist.

In the biographical film, Brody plays Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman, a Jewish-Polish pianist living in Warsaw during the Nazi invasion of Poland.

Polanski decided to shoot the movie in reverse, so when starting filming Szpilman would be at his most depleted.

Brody took on a near-starvation diet to prepare himself for the role.

In an interview with New York Magazine’s Vulture, Brody details the lengths he went to physically transform himself for the role.

Method acting has been embraced by a number of actors, including Adrien Brody.

Eating small bits of protein while practising Chopin for hours on end, the actor lost 13 kilograms for the role, dropping his body weight to 58kg.

“That was a physical transformation that was necessary for storytelling,” Brody said. “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.”

By the time they started filming, he had virtually stopped drinking water.

Six weeks before shooting started in Germany, Brody had parted with all of his material possessions, selling his car and apartment and putting his belongings in storage.

Method acting, the process of fully immersing yourself in a character sometimes to extreme lengths, has been embraced by a number of actors, including Brody.

“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,” Vulture recounted.

For the movie Wrecked, he ate ants and worms, playing a character stranded alone in the woods.

In Oxygen, while playing a serial killer with braces, he opted for metal ones rather than a prosthetic option.

“I didn’t know how f*****g painful that was until they stuck in pliers and ripped them off my teeth at the end,” he says.

The extreme style of acting doesn’t come without consequence consequences. The after-effects of Brody’s Oscar-winning performance were long. When asked whether he felt as though he had PTSD from the experience his response was “I do, yeah”.

“I definitely had an eating disorder for at least a year. And then I was depressed for a year, if not a lifetime. I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” he said. He reportedly had insomnia and panic attacks as a result of filming for The Pianist.

Following the debut of the movie, Brody didn’t work for about a year. However, his father Ellito Brody maintained the break was because “he wasn’t getting anything that was commensurate to what he had just done” rather than anything more sinister.