Adrien Brody: Oscar winner returns to his first love - painting

Adrien Brody at a studio in Brooklyn. Brody, 48, who won an Oscar nearly two decades ago for The Pianist, has recently returned to his first love, painting. Photo / Peter Fisher / The New York Times

In 2003, aged 29, Adrien Brody was the youngest winner in the history of the Oscars for best actor for his role in The Pianist. Then came a rich catalogue of disparate roles, including a scene-stealing cameo in Succession, and now, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. Alexis Soloski caught up with Brody in a borrowed artist's studio in Brooklyn.

The aqua slapped on to the canvas first. Then white, cobalt and cotton candy pink. Yellow blurted on with a rude noise, followed by red and black. This was on a frigid morning in a borrowed art studio in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. In a crumbly brick building along the industrial waterfront, the actor Adrien Brody knelt on a drop cloth, smearing and swirling paint with a plastic card until it formed patterns, layers and streaks.

"Painting, I would say, was my first love," he said.

Brody, 48, who won an Oscar nearly two decades ago for "The Pianist," has recently returned to painting, having shown his work, somewhat reluctantly, he said, at Art Basel Miami Beach and at an art fair in New York. The child of artistic parents — his mother, Sylvia Plachy, is a photographer, and his father, Elliot Brody, is a painter — he grew up drawing and painting.

Adrien Brody won Best Actor for his role in The Pianist. Photo / Supplied

As a teenager, he had applied to the visual arts programme at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. The arts programme rejected his portfolio but the drama department accepted him. The occasional graffiti tag aside, he gave up painting.

After a year at Stony Brook University and a semester at Queens College, he began acting in earnest, attracting the interest of Hollywood and art house directors including Terence Malick, Spike Lee, Barry Levinson, Ken Loach and Roman Polanski. While still in his 20s, he acquired a reputation as an actor of ferocious commitment and unstinting preparation, modifying his body when required, doing his own stunts when legal, eating a worm if a scene required it.

"I don't set out to do things that are difficult," he said. "That's not really what I'm looking to do. But things are difficult. And things that are meaningful tend to be difficult. I don't know the easy way."

Adrien Brody and Georgina Chapman at the 2021 Met Gala. Photo / Getty Images

Eight or nine years ago, when rewarding roles were thinner, he found himself with a brush in his hand again. After a years-long renovation of his castle in upstate New York near Syracuse, he invited his friend, the painter Georges Moquay, to create an original work for a central wall. Moquay suggested that Brody paint alongside him.

Brody painted a dragon. Moquay was impressed and asked why he wasn't painting. Brody had no good answer. So he began again, taking inspiration from the graffiti of his New York City youth.

Since then, whenever he films on location, he carves out an artist's studio in his temporary digs. "I'm compelled to keep producing," he said.

That morning in Brooklyn, he had woken up early at his home in Westchester County. With the help of his girlfriend, Georgina Chapman, the Marchesa designer, he had packed up his materials — canvases, acrylics, pastel sticks, spray paints, brushes — and brought them to a studio borrowed from Bill Hickey, a street artist.

"It's kind of recreating what I have, all strewn about," he said, arranging his paint tubes.

Once he started working, the chit-chat stopped. He produced a 3ft-by-4ft [1m-1.2m] canvas with a skull that he had sketched in charcoal the night before and spread paint around its edges, blotting it with bits of brown paper and distressing it with a paintbrush.

From a mini-fridge he grabbed a bottle of water. He uncapped it and took a gulp before pouring a steady stream on to the canvas, jiggling it to make the paint run. He spray painted some spider web and labyrinth stencils, followed by blobs of gold, then poured water over those, too.

Brody worked fast and intuitively, stooping, crouching, kneeling and squinting his sad eyes. "I don't know what I'm going to do," he said. "I like to just do it."

Adrien Brody as Julian Cadazio and Benicio Del Toro as Moses Rosenthaler in The French Dispatch, the film many commentators believe has been snubbed at the Oscars. Photo / Supplied

Paint stained his fingers, his shoes, his camouflage pants. A shoelace came untied. Several times he said that he had finished but, after pausing a few seconds, he would return to the canvas, daubing and smudging and spilling again. He didn't know the easy way.

"I'll let it dry, then I'll come back," he said. But he couldn't leave it alone. Instead, he unwrapped a fresh charcoal stick and touched up the outline of the skull, edging each tooth. He used white paint to make the light parts lighter, then black paint to darken the rest. He poured water over that, too. Then he splattered the canvas with his black brush.

"This is the problem, you just can't stop," he said, more than an hour after he had started.

Stopping has never really been Brody's thing. Even in his fallow years he made plenty of films and has kept up a busy schedule during the pandemic. He guest-starred on Succession, as a billionaire investor who takes meetings on his private island. He has leading roles in Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, an upcoming HBO drama series; Blonde, a Marilyn Monroe biopic on Netflix; and See How They Run, a period crime film.

Brody in Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. Photo / Supplied

He also stars in Clean, a new movie that he co-wrote. Brody, who plays the title character, a sanitation worker with a strict moral code and a talent for ultraviolence, also composed the film's score.

He doesn't see painting as separate from his acting. Or writing. Or music. "Oddly, they are so intertwined," he said. "They're all an extension of mind and heart and tumultuous stuff that is going on within."

He surveyed his skull and placed it against a trestle table to dry. He might apply some gold leaf later. Or work the background a bit more. But the piece, he thought, was mostly finished. He seemed pleased.

"I want to apply all my energy to things that I find interesting and creative," he said. "And bring a kind of beauty, a tormented, twisted beauty to the world."

New York Times
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