Adrien Brody: Victim status

Polanski's new star Adrien Brody has a track record of playing vulnerable characters. Is he genuinely anguished or is it all an act?

When Roman Polanski declined to cast me in the lead role of his film The Pianist, I wasn't bitter in the least. But I wondered how I would feel if I was ever called upon to interview Adrien Brody, the wretched, talentless bum who pipped me to the part. In truth, my money was on the whole thing ending horribly: me attacking him with the business end of a pain au chocolat, and a gaggle of PRs almost dropping their mobile phones in order to prise us apart. Now that we've met, though, and I've listened to his account of the ordeal he endured while making The Pianist, I know exactly how I feel to have had my acting-career curtailed. Relieved, in a word.

Two years ago, an advertisement appeared in the national press inviting 5ft 10in-tall, "sensitive, vulnerable and charismatic" actors of vaguely Eastern European appearance to audition for the lead in a film that Polanski was planning of Wladyslaw Szpilman's wartime memoir, The Pianist. I had no idea how many wildly differing varieties of 5ft 10in Eastern European men there could be – some of them Asian or Afro-Caribbean, and stretching far beyond 6ft – until I arrived at the Actors Centre on that chilly Saturday morning. Or rather, until I joined the end of a queue several streets away from the Actors Centre. Six hours, several bunions and a mild case of frostbite later, I had my Polaroid taken, and was informed by the casting director that I probably didn't look Jewish enough – "Oy vey!" I wanted to exclaim. "You might have told that to those cruel classmates at my old secondary school."

When Adrien Brody's name was announced as the successful candidate some months later, there can be few among us 2,000-odd hopefuls who didn't consider him a perfect fit. Brody (whose father is Jewish) was already established as a striking, discerning actor, though at that point he hadn't had the role that his ostentatiously tragic face deserved. The 26-year-old actor was visibly pained in Summer of Sam as a spiky-haired bisexual punk rocker suspected by his neighbours of being a serial killer (no, really), next to which his dutiful turn in Bread and Roses was always going to look unexciting. And his Oliver Twist eyes remained instrumental to the symphony of suffering that was The Thin Red Line.

But that face, long and thin as a violin, was clearly capable of reflecting a more profound anguish. Which is where Roman Polanski came in. Polanski gave Brody proper donkey-work to do. Forget bunions and frostbite. He had to shed 30lb from his already slender frame to play Szpilman, a concert pianist who managed through luck and perseverance to survive in occupied, shellshocked Warsaw after his family had been shipped off to the gas chambers. But Brody's ordeal didn't end with dropping a few waist-sizes. On set, Polanski had him lugging around dustbins full of Polish encyclopedias. Think of all those unnecessary consonants.

Then there was the loneliness. "Being on your own is one thing," he says, "but when you're embracing and encouraging this intense sadness, and you're away from your loved ones with no end in sight, it can be very difficult. I knew it was going to be a tough process, but I wasn't prepared for the psychological damage of being isolated. I had over a month and a half with no other actors there – just me and the crew in a room, six days a week, 16 hours a day. I would put earplugs in. Roman would communicate with the crew in Polish. I'd go sit in my trailer when we weren't shooting, and play my keyboard. But I was always alone."

Brody's face is pale with powder when we meet – he's just finished a TV interview – but even without that light dusting, there is something quaintly doll-like about him. The similarity is compounded by the way he arranges his limbs about himself – the gangly crossed legs, the arms lifelessly draped in his lap. You find yourself looking for the strings. Today he is wearing a trim, spiffy suit, and brogues big as Studebakers. As he talks, he winds a strand of his hair around a spindly finger that's like the stick Hansel shoves through the bars of his cage to convince the half-blind witch that he needs fattening up.

It's the face that really gets to you. Does he know how disconsolate he looks? "I'm aware of it," he says. "People sometimes ask me what the matter is." The corners of his mouth are moving, and I can see that he's suppressing a smile, the way you do when someone compliments you. Oh, that's clever: so he can turn the sadness on and off. On film it's so persuasive, it doesn't occur to you that he may be bluffing – that his please-don't-beat-me-again expression could be as much of a put-on as the dialogue and the costumes. Polanski, too, has that almost masochistic quality; it's there in the performance he gives in his own film The Tenant, in which his exaggerated benevolence is like an invitation for unspeakable punishments.

Casting an actor whose face alone appears to solicit cruelty is dangerous in a film such as The Pianist, where the last thing you want to suggest is that Szpilman was a born victim. The antidote to this is the picture's spellbinding blankness, which it inherits from Szpilman's writing, where everyday horrors are documented in a doggedly flat tone. Brody is an integral part of the recipe. The film is drained of sentiment, but without his soulful performance it might also be drained of life. So richly does he inhabit Szpilman that the picture has no need to engineer our sympathy – the simple sight of Brody wasting away before our eyes, his initial haughtiness crumbling into humility, is in itself distressing enough. For most of the picture, the brim of his hat looks meatier than he does. When he grows a beard, you worry that he won't be strong enough to carry its weight.

And still there's something to be said for that pain. "There is a kind of perverse pleasure in going as far as you can and becoming connected to the role," he confesses. "Even when it feels destructive. If I'm feeling that connection, then there's less to do to make other people believe it. If you've managed to go as far as you can, if you've lived through it and it hasn't broken you, then you come out of it a tougher person." He begins toying with a fresh strand of hair. I fear that one of us is about to mention Nietzsche. "Having said that, there were times on this movie when I completely lost sight of the joy."

The role cost him a long-term relationship, as well as several friendships. "It's the nature of the business. That relationship had survived four other pictures where she would come visit me. But there's no time to work things out when you're into something as deeply as I was into The Pianist. It affected my state of mind tremendously. I gave up my phone, and deliberately made it hard for people to contact me. I know I wasn't contributing good things to the relationship. So it was inevitable. And, sadly, we both knew that before I left."

Was it worth it? "That's tricky," he winces. "That's hard to gauge. But we're friends now. Perhaps better friends." We muse for a moment on that key dilemma, the conflict between career and personal life. "You end up regretting it either way," he decides. "I worked 17 years to get to a position where I'm worthy of a role such as this. What do I do? Not take it because it might ruin a relationship?" What he's saying is entirely defensible. But still: ouch. "You have to surrender everything as an artist. Sometimes it comes back in spades. Sometimes you get nothing."

Brody's most notorious experience of diminishing returns came on Terrence Malick's metaphysical war movie The Thin Red Line. He gave six months of his life to that movie – "Worked hard, never complained, almost got malaria" – and then sank into his seat at the premiere as he realised that his role had been reduced from chief protagonist to bit player. "I've tried to make that experience positive," he says, in a manner that suggests he hasn't quite achieved it yet. "For a long time afterwards, I really identified with soldiers. That movie was my experience of being at war. I'd given everything to the general and to my country, and when I returned home I was let go. I was like one of those Vietnam veterans who came back to all this anti-war sentiment; they were effectively abandoned."

It's a neat analogy, and the rejection evidently smarts, but I wonder if he's overstating the case a little. The fact is, he's an actor – an actor whose stock-in-trade happens to be pain. But he's on to that. He beats me to it. "Since The Pianist, I've started to acknowledge a larger scale of sadness than what's in my life. I have to appreciate what I've got, and take positivity wherever I can. I could get hit by a car tomorrow." That's the spirit, sunshine.

'The Pianist' is released on 24 January