One of the least typecast actors in Hollywood,
Adrien Brody -- star of the new period biopic Hollywoodland -- has
defied critics by choosing a wide range of roles on the basis that
they “look like fun”. This approach has taken him from the most
serious role imaginable, as a Polish Jew in Roman Polanski’s The
Pianist, to portraying Jack Driscoll in Peter Jackson’s big budget
adventure King Kong.Despite Brody’s
seemingly overnight success in The Pianist -- a role that made him
the youngest actor to win the Oscar for Best Actor -- he had
actually been struggling to make a name for himself since he
appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s 1993 movie King of the Hill. He went
on to receive praise for his turns in The Thin Red Line and Summer
of Sam, but wasn’t widely noticed until the success of The Pianist.
Since his Oscar success, however, Brody’s
movies -- with the exception of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village --
have tended to underperform at the box office. His 2005
psychological thriller The Jacket made only $15million at the
worldwide box office, barely half of its $28million budget. Even the
blockbuster King Kong failed to live up to expectations. In fact,
his only success since The Pianist came from Esquire Magazine, who
voted him Best Dressed Man in America 2004.
All this may be set to change, though, with
the release of Hollywoodland, Brody’s crime drama/biopic of Louis
Simo, the detective investigating the suspicious death of TV’s
Superman, George Reeves, in 1959. Including Brody himself, the movie
boasts two Oscar winners and two nominees -- Ben Affleck, Bob
Hoskins and Diane Lane. Such star power, combined with reports that
Hollywoodland was described before production began as “one of the
best scripts unproduced”, will have Brody hoping to return to our
good graces and box office success. Will it work? Well, we’ll have
to wait and see.
