Adrien Brody readily admits that the New York City he grew up in was rough around the edges. A native of Jackson Heights, Queens, he says the years he spent there in the '70s and '80s toughened him, but also made him empathetic—in other words, it gave him the ammunition he needed to become an actor. It wasn’t long into Brody's career that minor successes became major ones. Early roles in Restaurant and Summer of Sam in the late 1990s led to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist in 2002, a part that made the 29-year old the youngest to ever win the Academy Award for Best Actor. And while Brody’s career hasn’t slowed in the intervening decades, his latest performance, in The Brutalist, has drawn the same type of rare, unanimous acclaim that his breakthrough in The Pianist did. On this episode of Table for Two, Brody joins host Bruce Bozzi to discuss what drew him to the performing arts, the mental toll of method acting, and his perspective on this year’s Oscars, which take place March 2nd.

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