“How despicable someone can be”: Pedro Casablanc admired Adrien Brody right until they worked together
Your late 20s are meant to be the final dregs of your wild youth, a last chance to cut loose before you settle down and your body starts to hurt for no discernible reason, but not if you’re Adrien Brody.
At the age of 29, he won the Oscar for ‘Best Actor’, and two decades later, he repeated the feat with his outstanding performance in The Brutalist, making him the only person in history to win two ‘Best Actor’ awards from just two nominations.
The man clearly has talent, but that talent comes at a price, and Brody’s career has been dogged by controversy and scandal. He is a method actor, which often comes with a list of problems a mile long, like joining the likes of Steven Seagal and Sinéad O’Connor on the list of celebrities banned from Saturday Night Live, after an unfortunate incident involving the rapper Sean Paul.
His second Oscar acceptance speech broke the record for how long it went on for, and I could go on, but I’m going to let one of his former co-stars take over.
Moroccan-born actor Pedro Casablanc appeared alongside Brody in the 2008 film Manolete, and speaking on the Cañas y Barro podcast, he spoke about how his initial excitement surrounding this collaboration quickly faded. This quote has been directly translated from Spanish to English, so there are a few odd grammatical moments, but you should still get the gist of it, though.
“I really admired Adrien Brody after The Pianist, which was the last thing he had done,” Casablanc explained (via Meristation), “But as soon as I worked with him, my admiration vanished, it just disappeared… We had a very close-up shot, we were both in the frame, and he was pushing me out of the frame. Just look at how despicable someone can be.”
The movie was known by a number of different names in different territories, including A Matador’s Mistress in the United States and The Passion Within in the United Kingdom, and saw Brody star as Manuel Laureano Rodríguez Sánchez, a famous bullfighter. The film follows the man known as ‘Manolete’ towards the end of his career, when he becomes embroiled with controversial actress Lupe Sino, played by Penélope Cruz, and Casablanc plays a minor character simply called ‘General’.
According to Casablanc, his issues with his co-star abated when he wanted him to sign a copy of The Pianist (the movie that earned Brody his first Oscar) on DVD, as he explained, “When I brought it to him, he showered me with praise. He signed it, saying, ‘I still have fans'”.
Manolete was filmed in 2005, just two years after Brody’s first Oscar win, so his self-confidence must have been sky high, which might explain why he came across so arrogantly on set, but it wouldn’t last, as over the next few years, his profile would drop significantly, to the point where people wondered if he was a victim of the ‘Oscar’s curse’. Perhaps if Casablanc had approached him just a couple of years later, he might have gotten a very different response.
