‘Peaky Blinders’: the one role Adrien Brody desperately tried to keep alive.

 Across his career Adrien Brody has tried his hand at various roles making his filmography a consistently entertaining and vastly eclectic collection. He is arguably most famous for his definitive performance as Polish Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman in the 2002 drama The Pianist a heartbreaking picture based on the 1946 memoir of the same name by Szpilman. Depicting the Holocaust in a remarkably profound way both the book and film rank among the most important accounts of the genocide.

The severe extent of Brody’s performance of the role, which saw him inflict immense physical and emotional pain on himself added authenticity to the picture. Eventually his work resulted in him taking home the Oscar for Best Actor. Aged only 29 this made Brody the youngest actor to win in the category and set him up for a successful career.

Since that crowning achievement Brody has helped bring to life a host of celebrated movies and TV shows. In 2005 he starred as the writer Jack Driscoll in Peter Jackson’s expansive and costly adaptation of the King Kong story. The project remains a career highlight even if the picture is overlooked by contemporary audiences. Elsewhere he’s worked with the master of quirky filmmaking Wes Anderson on four titles including The Darjeeling Limited and The Grand Budapest Hotel. Although the former is an exceptional tale of personal discovery the latter gets more plaudits with Brody’s character Dmitri a sinister villain distinctive in his oeuvre.

More recently Brody starred in the third season of the hit HBO series Succession as the shareholder Josh Aaronson which saw him draw on real people and tech giants to create the character. In 2022 Brody also delivered a well-received turn as playwright and husband of Marilyn Monroe Arthur Miller in Andrew Dominik’s Blonde opposite Ana de Armas.

Whilst all the characters above were compelling in one way or another there is only one that had Brody begging to reprise. This was the New York mafioso Luca Changretta whom he played in the explosive fourth season of Peaky Blinders. By his admission he desperately tried to persuade the show runners to keep the antagonist alive so he could return for revenge.

A character like that was something that I’d been wanting to play for many years  Brody told Entertainment Weekly in 2022. It had room for all of this fun stuff to honour a style in film making and acting that I loved and a style and character and lore within the foundations of family  mafia honour and all these things. I desperately tried to persuade them to find a way to keep Luca alive to come back for revenge. I really wanted to stay. I did not want to go home.