On March 2nd, 2025, Adrien Brody won his second Oscar award for his main role in the three-hour-and-thirty-minute film, The Brutalist. Brody portrayed a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the United States following the end of the war. The movie was nominated for ten awards that night, winning three of them, including Best Actor. However, Brody came under fire when it was announced that Artificial Intelligence was used for a few short minutes out of the movie to enhance the actor’s Hungarian accent, making it more realistic. People argued that this was an outrage and should have gotten the film revoked from the list of nominations. Using AI is tricky business, after all. While I can understand why the creators chose to make this creative decision, I don’t believe that AI should be used in anything creative.
However, this is not the main reason why people have taken their anger out on Adrien Brody. After all, he didn’t decide to use AI on his voice for a small portion of a behemoth of a film. Brody did, however, make quite a few controversial decisions over the years. By years, I mean over twenty years of interesting choices.
In 2003, Adrien Brody participated in a racist sketch for SNL in which he donned fake dreadlocks and put on a fake Jamaican accent to introduce the musical guest, Sean Paul, while hosting the night’s episode. While he mentioned recently that he was not officially banned from SNL following the racist bit, he admitted that he was never invited back to host. You may be wondering, “How is this not SNL’s fault for giving him that script?” Well, to that I would tell you that it was not in the script for him to do that. While SNL certainly had a part to play, they were not happy with him going off-script to list off a variety of stereotypical Jamaican phrases and talk about Sean Paul’s family name.
The SNL skit came not long after he won his first Oscar for Best Actor for playing the lead role in The Pianist, another movie about a Jewish man surviving the Holocaust. Was his performance in this film breathtaking and heartbreaking? Of course. Was it also made by a man convicted of raping a child and fleeing the United States to evade capture, staying off of U.S. soil to avoid arrest? Also yes. Roman Polanski’s legacy is not just about creating infamous movies. Adrien Brody has a long history of defending and signing onto projects by known and alleged predators, including Woody Allen. In 2016, when asked about working with Polanski and whether he can separate the art from the artist, he said, “It’s an artistic pursuit, and Polanski for instance had a very complicated and difficult life. It would be unfair of me to delve into something as complicated as the past that was brought up in the media.” Following The Pianist, when asked if he would ever work with Polanski again, he responded by saying that the question was “too complex” to answer.
He last worked with director Woody Allen in 2011, and commented on the allegations made by Mia Farrow’s daughter Dylan Farrow (Mia and Woody were romantic partners from 1980-1992), who alleged that her father had sexually abused her. Brody said quite vaguely about whether private and work lives can possibly be separated, “Well, to a certain extent. I mean, again, people make mistakes in lives.” Um, HELLO? He followed this up by saying, “Of course it’s horrible what comes out sometimes, and people have done things in their lives that may be inexcusable, but it’s not something to focus on.”
I don’t know how you can decide to just “not focus” on something as big as sexual abuse.
When Adrien accepted the Best Actor award back in 2003 for The Pianist, he surprised Halle Berry by drawing her in for a passionate kiss on stage as she presented him with the trophy. She later mentioned in an interview that this caught her off guard as she was not aware of his plan to do so. At the time, this was controversial and became one of the most remembered Oscar’s moments. While Halle got her “payback” last night by kissing him on the red carpet in a similar manner, this is still an awkward moment of the past that reminds us of the fine line between consent and assault. It shouldn’t matter if Halle and Adrien seem to be friends now because the matter remains that an nonconsensual kiss is still an act of assault and a violation to someone.
Now, Adrien has been dating fashion designer Georgina Chapman, the ex-wife of incarcerated sex offender Harvey Weinstein, since 2019. While this is a perfectly normal relationship (hopefully), in the 2000s, he was known for pursuing much younger women. When Brody was thirty years old, he was seen hanging out frequently with his co-star Keira Knightly, who was eighteen at the time. While there was never a confirmed relationship, pictures of him with his arm around her were common. What is confirmed though, was the relationship he had with Russian model Lara Leito, who was nineteen years old when Brody was thirty-nine. They were together for five years. I don’t know about anyone else, but dating teenagers at his grown age is baffling.
Just a few days ago, in just an all-around pompous move, Adrien Brody broke the Oscar’s record for the longest ever acceptance speech (cue my eyes rolling). His speech lasted a whopping five minutes and forty seconds. Now, I would have been more forgiving if he had anything genuinely important to say in this length of time. But it wasn’t until the end that Brody stopped droning on and on, mentioning anti-semitism (a real issue in the world) and how we should all come together. Acceptance speeches are supposed to be around the forty-five second mark, by the way. But you know, some people forget, or they still feel that they have important things to get off their chest. So it was when the orchestra began to play the soft melodies to signal Brody to wrap it up that he interrupted them and curtly reminded them, “I’ve done this before. Thank you,” and had them stop playing so he could continue to ramble. This is essentially a repeat of his 2003 acceptance when he cut the orchestra off. Except that time, you could blame it on being a first timer.
I said that was the final section, but alas, we must never forget the gum wad Brody chewed up and spat out just to throw to his own girlfriend, Georgina, who missed the catch. While this isn’t the most controversial action, it’s certainly an odd one.
But Adrian is familiar with odd actions. Let’s just hope America comes to its senses about them.