Adrien Brody has told RTÉ Entertainment that his lead role in the Oscar-tipped epic The Brutalist feels like fate.
Directed by Brady Corbet and co-written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist tells the story of László Tóth, a Hungarian architect who survives the Holocaust and comes to the United States to rebuild his life.
There, László is hired by industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) and is finally reunited with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) as he pursues the American Dream and work that will stand the test of time.
For Brody, who in 2003 became the youngest man to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in The Pianist, The Brutalist is another deeply personal film that honours his own Polish Jewish and Hungarian background.
A key scene in The Brutalist sees Pearce's character tell Brody's: "It is no coincidence that fate brought us together", and when it was put to Brody that the line also applies to him and the film, he immediately agreed.
"There were, as you probably know, great periods of time where this film had come to me and gone away and there were several iterations of it that didn't come to fruition with me - fortunately!" he said.
"And then it came around - but I had read this script over five years ago, I believe, at this point.
"Fortunately, it did come to me, and I do feel very acutely right for portraying this character and helping Brady to tell this story," Brody continued, "my own journey and my own ancestral hardships that I'm aware of and that speak to me and I think [are] quite universal. But I think I am the right man for the job."
When asked if another line in the film, "I'm not what I expected either", was his true north for the character of László Tóth, Brody replied: "It's a lovely question... I think we all yearn for an idea and a sense of completeness and fulfilment. So much of what we assume life should be, and even what that sense of fulfilment is and will give us, is imagined.
"You have to experience life and continue to evolve, and I guess the takeaway is that you are... it's a constant evolution and, hopefully, you are growing and accepting and improving upon that.
"But I think the character is very conscious of all of the hardships and the frailty of his own existence - and it's not clearly what he might have envisioned earlier on with his own yearnings..."
The Oscar nominations will be announced on Thursday.
The Brutalist is in cinemas from Friday.
