Adrien Brody Says Mother’s Life Journey Gave Him Sense Of ‘Kinship’ With Hungarian Émigré Character In Venice Title ‘The Brutalist’

Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn and Stacy Martin hit the Venice Film Festival on Sunday for the premiere of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.

They were joined at the press conference by the other members of the buzzy cast – Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé and Alessandro Nivola – who squeezed onto the stage.

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Brody stars as László Tóth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who emigrates to the U.S. with his wife Erzsébet after surviving the Holocaust. Working through poverty and indignity toward the “American dream.’

Pearce plays a mysterious wealthy client who gives him a life-changing contract, while Jones is Tóth’s wife.

Brody said he had felt “immediate kinship and understanding” for the character of Tóth due to the trajectory of his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy.

“She’s a wonderful photographer, but she’s also a Hungarian immigrant who fled Hungary in 1956 in the Hungarian Revolution. She was a refugee and emigrated to the United States, and much like László started again and lost their home and pursued a dream of being an artist,” he told the press conference.

“I understand a great deal about the repercussions of that on her life and her work as an artist, which I think is a wonderful parallel With László creations and how they evolved and how post war psychology influences your work in a creative manner and all other aspects of your life… this fiction feels very real to me, and that’s so important for me to embody a character and make him real, and for a film like this to not only represent the past, but remind us of the past and how so many things in our present we must learn from.”

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