Adrien Brody reflects on his ‘starvation diet’ for The Pianist: ‘I got sick’

Star won an Oscar for his performance as Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman

Adrien Brody has reflected on the extreme preparation he did for his role as a Holocaust survivor in the 2002 film The Pianist.

The actor, now 48, won an Oscar for his performance as Polish Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose autobiography the film was based on.

To date, Brody is the only actor under the age of 30 to have taken home the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Speaking about the movie in a new interview in The Sunday Times Magazine, Brody said: “I can’t even watch the film. I can’t. I kind of cry when I talk about it.”

Asked whether he had issues with his body afterwards, he said: “I got sick from it. It was cumulative. I had a starvation diet, then had to gain it back. My metabolism shifted. I thought I’d experimented and lost, that my body was going to be different from now on.”

Brody said he turned down the opportunity to star in Werner Herzog’s film Rescue Dawn (which eventually starred Christian Bale) as the character he would have played “had dysentery and an ant hill on his head” and “was consistently tortured”.

“It seems silly now but I really hadn’t recovered [from The Pianist],” he said.

When Brody was nominated for the Oscar in 2003, his competitors in the category were Jack Nicholson, Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine and Daniel Day-Lewis.

Adrien Brody in ‘The Pianist’ (Guy Ferrandis/Focus Features/Studio Canal/Kobal/Shutterstock)

The ceremony was four days after the US invasion of Iraq, and, Brody recalled, Nicholson called the nominees over to his house and proposed they all boycott the event.

“I said, ‘I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going,’” Brody admitted. “I said, ‘I kind of have to show up. My parents are coming. This doesn’t come around too often. I know you guys are all winners. You can sit it out. But I can’t.’”

Brody can next be seen in the basketball drama, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, which airs on Sky Atlantic and Now from 28 March.