Performed magic shows at children's birthdays as a child as the Amazing Adrien.
He attended a charity auction in November 2011 for Artists for Peace & Justice, which was offering "Tea with Gerard Butler" as a bidding item; it was a chance to meet and chat with Butler. Brody's $15,000 bid was the winner. On a whim, Brody offered to host "Champagne with Adrien Brody" as a last-minute addition to the auction, if it could take place later that day; he had a bottle available. Brody's offer was accepted, and it earned an additional $17,000 for the charity.
In 2003, at the age of 29, he replaced Richard Dreyfuss as the youngest actor ever to win the Best Actor Academy Award, for his role in The Pianist (2002).
He was furious when his nose was broken during the final fight in Summer of Sam (1999). When he had it fixed, he didn't change it: his nose is one of his most distinctive features and sets him apart from other actors.
Did sessions in an isolation tank, performed prison exercises, and went on a protein diet for his role in The Jacket (2005).
In 1992, he was seriously hurt in a motorcycle accident in which he flew over a car and crashed feet-first into a crosswalk. He spent months recuperating.
Admits a shot of his parents in a passionate, back-bending embrace inspired his famous kiss with Halle Berry at the Oscars in 2003.
He has expressed considerable interest in playing The Joker in a Batman film.
In 2004, Esquire Magazine named him the Best Dressed Man in America.
I was a wild, mischievous kid and I had tremendous imagination. Any experience I had, I'd try to reenact it. I always had an actor within me.
I think to be a well-rounded person, you have to experience good and bad, wonderful moments and pain. You need to meet people who have no exposure to kindness, who lack any opportunity and have no way out--like the homeless, the mentally ill--and you've got to learn empathy for them.
My dad told me, "It takes fifteen years to be an overnight success", and it took me seventeen and a half years.
I'm not the kind of person to deliberately behave differently for the sake of behaving differently, but there are certain things that you have to kind of be true to and sacrifice your own freedom at that time to do.
I've never taken a role for money. I felt it would be wrong - not necessarily a career decision - just wrong.
I suppose that means I'm not easy to define. But that's good, isn't it? In this town they love to define you to death.
Everything is harder than you would imagine, including success. You might think it's lovely to be famous, but if your process is to constantly observe people and human behavior and yet everyone is observing you all the time, how do you do what you do? I never saw that coming as an obstacle.
I don't think anyone saw me as the heroic leading man before I won an Oscar. I'm not sure anyone does now, outside of Peter Jackson.
I would have loved to make a lot of money as an actor. I would have loved to not live in a shitty little apartment for most of the time I've been in Los Angeles. I would have loved to have nice things and bought new cars, but it's painful for me to do a bad role. Personally painful. You feel like you're lying to everybody. It's just not worth it.
I grew up without a lot of money and my parents grew up with far less money. And that's kept me in line. Really in line.
You get a little fame as an actor and suddenly people ask your opinion on world politics and why we're in Iraq. Why is my opinion any more valid than anyone else's? My opinion doesn't count more just because I'm famous now.
What guides me is to do work that's more avant-garde - things that I think are special. You can easily become a celebrity and get caught up in all that blur. I just want to work and surprise myself.
I was always an actor - not in a way that people might presume actors to be, 'cause I believe there's a presumption that they like attention all the time, and that they're very outgoing. Acting is perhaps misunderstood. I'm a relatively shy person. I often liken it to my mother's approach as an artist, because she's a photographer and she sees so much in a situation that very few people might see. She'll see so much happening beneath the surface with an imagery that says something else. And I have a fascination with a similar kind of thing where I see details in people's mannerisms, or beneath something that's said to someone else. All these things that lay beneath the surface and things that are really special and that make us all so unique. Growing up in New York, I encountered so many different kinds of people everywhere. I went to the School of Performing Arts, but I feel like my real acting training came from going to and from school on four different trains each way, because of how many human beings I've encountered, between homeless people and immigrant workers and shark businessmen and every kind of human being - every kind of human being every other step. My natural fascination was that I gravitated toward their mannerisms - not to use as an actor, just because I'm curious, I guess. And rather than capture the image with photography, I feel like I capture it somehow and remember details very specifically, and I retain things very easily and evoke them later.
The reality is that, for me, acting is somewhat of a painful process. A beautiful process, but a painful one. The more I have to do battle to find truth, the more painful it is if I don't, because film is permanent. So it's important the work I choose is something I can have that confidence in. Otherwise, a movie becomes a permanent reminder of a mistake you made.
Everybody has a price, I'm sure. Often times the jobs you'll be well-compensated for are that way for a reason. The roles that speak to you usually don't have resounding success, or even compensate you fairly. There is a balance you try to strike. Really, if I wasn't an actor, I don't know what the alternative would be. I'm glad I don't have to face that.
