ONTD

Adrien’s mother is award winning photographer Sylvia Plachy. But she has never shot her him publicly… until now. For Canadian magazine NUVO.

It happened in the summer, they just drove around New York and when the light was right and she was feeling it, he’d hop out of the car and the results are some magnificent photos of her son, prompting the magazine to issue two covers.











Words. Writers labour over them; actors memorize, rehearse and recite them for take after take to ensure each word is meaningful and delivered to perfection. “It takes me a moment sometimes to think of the appropriate word. I do not want to say things that I don’t mean. Words are important, and the choice of one’s words is very important,” says Adrien Brody.

And this is how we begin. An actor and a writer—and words. Brody does not give off the smooth-talking, sound bite–heavy suaveness that defines so many of his contemporaries. He is eloquent and humble, his voice deep and his laugh infectious, his words thoughtful and sincere.

Waiting this afternoon at a hotel in New York’s Lower East Side, Brody is on a break from post-production work on his upcoming film Cadillac Records. He has selected a corner spot on the outdoor terrace. His shoulders are hunched, his long arms hang between his knees and his toque is pulled low. I’m never sure if this draws more or less attention to a person, but on this day, with so few around, it’s a moot point. My eyes are directed at him; it’s his face, long and thin, that really gets to you, and there’s something behind those deep-set green eyes that defies you not to be drawn in.

He was born in the Woodhaven neighbourhood of Queens in New York, the only child of Elliot Brody, a history teacher of Polish descent, and Sylvia Plachy, a Hungarian-born photographer. It was a creative, artistic household. “My mother discovered the acting school [the American Academy of Dramatic Arts] by being on an assignment, and thought I might enjoy it,” recounts Brody. Enthused, he enrolled. “It was something I knew I loved immediately, and it was my mother’s intuition and understanding me, when she photographed that school, that it was a perfect outlet for my kind of adventuresome behaviour and imagination. I am grateful for that, because I don’t know if I would have found that. Who knows.” And thus, Brody began to focus on acting.

His conversation is a maze of starts and stops, long pauses, lucid proclamations, stream-of-consciousness digressions and sentences that trail off. “I started working professionally right away. I got a job. I was working in the East Village, taking the train in from junior high school in Queens to go to the theatre and work on this play, Family Pride in the Fifties by Joan Schenkar. I didn’t feel the burden of it having to be a profession. I began acting before supporting myself became an issue,” he says.

This excerpt is from the Winter 2008 issue of NUVO.

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