Actor Adrien Brody said a makeup artist on the film set of The Brutalist tried to remove his nose after mistaking it for a prosthetic.
“This woman was busily working away with a solvent on my nose,” the Jewish actor, 51, said during an appearance on The Tonight Show with host Jimmy Fallon on Monday. “I said: ‘Are you trying to remove that?’ and she said: ‘Yes.' And I said: ‘That doesn’t come off.”
Brody explained how a new team of makeup artists were working on the facial prosthetics required to age his character 30 years when the woman attempted to “remove” his nose – which was certainly not a prosthetic addition. He told Fallon that the artist apologised and said, “This is going in my diary.”
“Now it’s going in my talk show repertoire,” Brody quipped.
The actor, who is nominated for a Bafta and an Oscar for his portrayal of Hungarian Holocaust survivor and architect László Tóth in The Brutalist, has reportedly broken his nose three times doing stunts for films — once while filming a fight scene in Spike Lee’s 1999 movie Summer of Sam.
Brody also told Fallon that he learned Hungarian for The Brutalist, explaining the film’s personal resonance:
“My mom and my grandparents actually fled Budapest in the 50s during the Hungarian revolution and so my character László essentially comes from war-torn Europe, flees Hungary through the horrors of World War II and emigrates to America,” Brody said. “That immigrant experience was very personal to me, and hearing the language in my grandparents’ home all the time was very familiar.”
“It was a wonderful chance to honour their story in my own work,” he said.
In 2002, Brody won an Oscar for his portrayal of a Polish-Jewish musician in Roman Polanski’s Holocaust film The Pianist, becoming the youngest ever person to win the category.
