Adrien Brody won an Academy Award for his performance in Roman Polanski’s ՛The Pianist՛ at the age of 29, making him the youngest actor ever to receive the award for Best Actor. However, the role came with heavy sacrifices, as Brody had to fully immerse himself in the mindset of a resilient Jewish pianist who had lost everything.
To embody a man who had lost everything, he broke up with his girlfriend and went on an extreme diet, losing 30 pounds. His diet consisted of two boiled eggs for breakfast, chicken for lunch, and a small portion of chicken or fish with steamed vegetables for dinner.
The actor gave up his apartment, sold his car, disconnected his phones, and moved to Europe with nothing but two suitcases and a keyboard. Polanski also required him to practice piano for four hours a day until he could convincingly play excerpts from Chopin’s greatest works.
In an interview, Brody stated that the beauty of what he does is that it gives him the opportunity to let go of who he is and try to understand someone else, another time, another struggle, other emotions. If you truly immerse yourself in it, you connect, and it’s very rewarding. But the most surprising and difficult challenge for him was the emotional toll of starvation.
After filming wrapped, Brody openly discussed the depression he experienced while playing Szpilman. He said that when he starved, there was an emptiness he had not experienced. He had experienced loss and sadness in his life, but he didn’t know the despair that comes with hunger.
While preparing for the role, Brody also spent a lot of time studying the Holocaust. He explained that he was depressed for an entire year after The Pianist. It wasn’t just depression; it was mourning. There were moments when the actor was unsure if he would come out of it with his sanity intact, and in the end, he said it took him a year and a half to “get back to normal.”
According to Adrien Brody, more than 20 years later, he is still haunted by The Pianist and continues to deal with the aftermath of his Oscar-winning role, but he has many ideas for the future.
