Adrien Brody hopes The Brutalist ‘reawakens empathy for immigrants’

Adrien Brody said he hopes his new film The Brutalist can “reawaken” empathy for immigrants.

The Oscar-tipped drama focusses on Brody’s Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the United States.

Brody, 51, said he took inspiration for the role from his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, whose family emigrated to the United States from Budapest in 1958 after the Hungarian Revolution.

“I witnessed my own mother’s journey, how she and her parents fled terrible circumstances only to enter a harsh new reality of being foreigners,” he told the Sunday Times.

“They had the obstacles of assimilation. But most of us in the US have come from such a past – second generation, third generation. So it is incongruous that there can be apathy towards people’s yearning to come over and be a contributing part of my nation.

“I hope this reawakens empathy for immigrants.”

The comments come as Donald Trump’s incoming administration has indicated that raids to detain and deport migrants living in the US without permission will begin on the first day of his presidency.

Brody is a frontrunner for Best Actor at the Academy Awards after winning the equivalent honour at the Golden Globes earlier this month.

In the opening scenes of the three-and-a-half hour film, his character Tóth arrives in New York as a Jewish immigrant, before finding patronage in Harrison Lee Van Buren, as played by Guy Pearce, who tasks him with refurbishing his private library.

Similarities have been drawn between the role and his portrayal of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish pianist who survives the Holocaust, in Roman Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist.

Preparing for that film, Brody became ill after losing unhealthy amounts of weight. For The Brutalist, he has taken a more relaxed approach and said he is now a “grown-up”.

“As a young man I did not feel that I could faithfully honour all that was on my shoulders with The Pianist, so I dug very deep,” he said.

“I abandoned my life, loved ones, home, phone, car, in order to deliver truth. But it’s less toxic now. I no longer think it’s necessary to torment yourself.”

Brody won Best Actor at the Oscars for The Pianist but fled Hollywood soon afterwards for a quiet life on the east coast.

On winning his Oscar, he said: “I had never had that kind of love for my work — from anyone,” adding that the accolade didn’t make a lot of sense to him.

“So I shunned it. I moved. I isolated myself to live in the countryside and be in nature, and to fix up an old pick-up truck and house. I saw how much was coming to me and felt unnerved.”

The Brutalist is released in the UK on January 24.