Adrien Brody opens up on playing holocaust survivor in 'The Brutalist'

Adrien Brody opened up on how his mother Sylvia Plachy’s journey made him understand his character of Tóth in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.

The Brutalist follows Hungarian-born Jewish architect László Tóth (Brody). He survives the holocaust and emigrates to the U.S., where he faces poverty and works in indignity to achieve the American Dream.

He gets a big contract from a mysterious client (Pearce), while Jones plays his wife in the film.

At the press conference, Brody said he felt “immediate kinship and understanding” toward his character because of his mother’s journey.

“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 said.

He continued: “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.”

Adrien Brody attended the Venice Film Festival on Sunday for the premiere of The Brutalist alongside cast members Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Stacy Martin, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé and Alessandro Nivola.