Adrien Brody picked up his second Academy Award on Sunday for his performance as Hungarian architect László Tóth in The Brutalist, and the actor’s affinity for brutalist architecture is part of what attracted him to the role. In fact, the actor would come to appreciate brutalism through his numerous stops in Prague, according to a recent interview.
The Brutalist was nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director (Brady Corbet), and would go on to win three, with cinematographer Lol Crawley and composer Daniel Blumberg picking up statuettes alongside Brody. Though primarily set in post-WWII Pennsylvania, the film has roots in Central and Eastern European architecture.
For Brody, multiple personal connections drew him to The Brutalist, including Hungarian roots (his mother emigrated to the United States during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956) and a personal affinity for the brutalist architecture at the heart of the movie.
“I greatly appreciated brutalism, even before this film,” Brody told Pamela Jahn in an interview from last year’s Venice Film Festival published this week by The Arts Desk.
“I remember being in Prague, where I would see these structures and marvel at them. I’m drawn to the rawness and the audacity and the evocative nature in a lot of brutalist designs, and what transpired from it after the mid-century, and I also like the simple elegance and practicality in a lot of that.”
“I grew up in the home of artists, and I view my work as an actor as a pursuit of an artistic expression. I paint, I’ve renovated old building structures, and I do have a passion for visual, tactile, and sensorial artistic experiences. In that sense, I’ve always been fascinated by architecture. It’s another art form.”
Is Prague’s architecture all that brutalist? Not according to the architects who created some of the city’s most striking buildings erected over the second half of the 20th century.
In last year’s excellent documentary Czechoslovak Architecture 58-89, only the city’s InterContinental Hotel was identified as being purely brutalist in construction, though many others, including the iconic Prague TV Tower, are considered brutalist by the general public.
But brutalist or otherwise, Brody has a number of occasions to appreciate Prague’s architecture, having shot multiple films in the Czech Republic over the past few decades.
In 2000’s Harrison’s Flowers, he co-starred as a veteran photojournalist working in war-torn Croatia, played by locations in Milovice, northwest of Prague. His supporting performance in that feature reportedly led Roman Polanski to cast him in The Pianist, which won him his first Oscar.
In 2001’s The Affair of the Necklace, Brody starred opposite fellow two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. Prague stood in for pre-Revolutionary France in the movie, which filmed at Barrandov Studio and on location around the city and other areas of the Czech Republic.
Brody returned to Prague for director Rian Johnson in 2008’s The Brothers Bloom, which includes memorable scenes shot in some of the Czech capital’s most famous landmarks, including Charles Bridge and Old Town Square.
And in 2014, Brody would film the historical epic Emperor, in which he starred as Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, in Barrandov Studio and locations in Prague and around the Czech Republic. Despite being fully shot and nearly finished, the movie has languished in limbo after producer Paul Breuls was arrested for fraud in 2017 and remains unreleased more than a decade after its production.
Lead photo: Adrien Brody in The Brutalist (2024); Prague TV Tower via Pixabay / TomasHa73
