Adrien Brody Was Yearning for a Project Like ‘The Brutalist’ for Decades (Exclusive)

Adrien Brody’s new movie “The Brutalist” is getting a lot of award-season buzz, earning seven Golden Globe nominations.

“Extra’s” Adam Weissler spoke with Adrien, who plays a Jewish architect who escapes the horrors of World War II to rebuild his life in Pennsylvania with his wife, played by Felicity Jones.

The film, which has a staggering three-and-a-half-hour runtime and includes an intermission, is another career-defining moment for Brody, who said he saw the screenplay as “a challenge.”

“This is what I’ve been looking for, this is two decades of me looking for this. Now, it’s a matter of me meeting those challenges,” Adrien explained. “It is what I’ve been yearning for as an artist. We work in the movie business and we all have to find things that feed us, and I’ve had a lot of amazing opportunities and I’ve had a wonderful career with a lot of exploration and I’m grateful for all of that, but again, there’s a level of completeness to this, beyond a complexity of a character for me to represent that has, I think, a lot of relevance and a lot of personal connections that I can draw from and speak to.”

“I hope it doesn’t take another 20 years to find one, but it’s taken that long to find something of this magnitude,” Brody noted.

Adrien called it a “joy” to play his character László Tóth, who he described as a “real human being” with “deep flaws and addictions and struggles and traumas that he’s overcoming.”

Brody also reacted to the acclaim and accolades, saying, “To be recognized by people who know film and love film and yearning for films of this caliber, and to have your work singled out from the sea of talent that, unfortunately, does not receive the opportunity, is something I can’t even put into words because I’ve been doing this my whole life and it’s never left me… I’ve never really lost perspective because I’m always connected to the journey of an actor and my fellow actors and how it relates to other artistic pursuits… This yearning of leaving behind something of significance and how few opportunities there are for us, and so to receive recognition for work that you’ve spent your lifetime devoted to is really something.”

In 2003, Adrien won an Oscar for Best Actor for his work in “The Pianist.”