Adrien Brody wins best actor Oscar for The Brutalist

The Guardian

03-03-2025

Adrien Brody has won the Academy Award for best actor for his role in Brady Corbet's post-war epic The Brutalist.
In 2003, Brody became the youngest ever winner of the same award, when he took the prize for his role in Roman Polanski's The Pianist, aged 29 years, 343 days.
Now 51, Brody's win on Sunday means he retains that record; his key competitor for the award this time round was Timothée Chalamet, 22 years his junior, for Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.
Brody's win puts him into the elite ranks of actors who have a 100% win rate at the Oscars from two or more nominations – Vivien Leigh, Hilary Swank, Kevin Spacey, Luise Rainer, Christoph Waltz, Helen Hayes and Mahershala Ali.
In The Brutalist, Brody plays László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian modernist architect who survives the second world war, via its concentration camps, and ends up in the US.
There, he's commissioned by tycoon Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) to design and build a huge community centre, with a chapel and swimming pool, in memory of his late mother. The film charts Tóth's career, his combative relationship with his mentor, and his marriage to wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones).
In his review, the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw praised Brody's 'angular fierceness and passion', calling it 'a career best for him, surely, and an advance on his performance in Roman Polanski's The Pianist.'
Brody has taken almost all of the key awards in the run-up to the Oscars, including the Golden Globe for actor in a drama, the Critics Choice award and the Bafta. But his run was broken last weekend, when Chalamet scooped the Screen Actors Guild prize.
In January, a minor row broke out when it emerged that AI had been used to help smooth the Hungarian accents of Brody and Jones. Corbet was quick to dampen down the backlash, saying the performances were 'entirely their own'.
The 97th Academy Awards are taking place in Hollywood, hosted by Conan O'Brien.