Adrien Brody's Grandfather Once Got Fired From a Broadway Musical. Now Brody's Making His Broadway Debut

When Adrien Brody was younger, his mother took him to a maximum security prison. An esteemed photographer, Sylvia Plachy was there to document the men serving life sentences at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. That experience affected Brody deeply; he vividly remembers meeting a man who had been incarcerated for over 40 years, since he was a teenager. 

“I purchased this beautiful box from him that he made with cigarette wrappers,” recalls Brody, marveling, his voice filled with emotion. “It was the most incredible artistic pyramid, like origami, sturdy construction with bands holding up the lid. And it just was the most beautiful thing. He spent God knows how many hours making this work of art. And his whole life has been taken from one stupid move.” Brody still has that box, a piece of artistry borne out of tragic circumstances.

So, when Lindsey Ferrentino sent Brody her script for The Fear of 13, the actor wept the first time he read it—overwhelmed by the play’s brutality and its beauty. The play is based on the 2015 documentary about Nick Yarris, who served 22 years on death row for a murder he didn’t commit. He was exonerated using DNA evidence and released in 2004. It made Brody think of the man he had met in that Louisiana prison, of the people whose lives were upended by a moment of bad judgment and who are not given an opportunity to redeem themselves. “I thought it was written so, so wonderfully, and it speaks to so much pervasive injustice,” explains Brody. “People end up getting subjected to tremendous punishment in this world, and many people are unaware. Or many people are aware but don't know what to do about it, and so we carry on with our busy lives. This shines a light on what's going on.” 

After a sold-out London run, where Brody received an Olivier Award nomination for his performance, The Fear of 13 opens on Broadway at the James Earl Jones Theatre April 15. Brody plays Nick opposite Tessa Thompson as Jacki, who works tirelessly to free him; both actors, known for their screen work, make their Broadway debuts. For Brody—who grew up in Queens (and whose parents still live there), went to LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, and actually performed in an Off-Broadway play (Family Pride in the 50s at Theater for the New City) at the age of 12—The Fear of 13 is a homecoming.

It's also a Broadway debut that's been a long time coming for Brody's family; his maternal grandfather was once hired as a dancer in Zorba. “He got fired!” laughs Brody, speaking to Playbill one morning before rehearsals for Fear of 13. “He gave the director advice, and he was like, ‘Get this fucking guy outta here.’” His grandfather passed away when Brody was seven, but he's someone the actor frequently channels in his work (notably in The Brutalist). “A lot of him exists within me." He then says, proudly and a little playfully, "so in a way, he is making his Broadway debut. And he's gonna hopefully see this one through!”

Brody says he didn't sign on to The Fear of 13 to see his name in lights. “I didn't have this cavalier attitude, like, ‘Yes, we'll go to Broadway,’” he maintains. “I just was very happy to find work that spoke to me, and enabled me to grow and work in a way that I had been yearning to work for a long time. Even in film, to be honest, people say, ‘Oh, when you made this movie, did you think you'd get all this respect?' Not at all. I mean, you can't really go into anything with that.”

While many can see The Fear of 13 as an advocacy piece for prison reform (the real-life Yarris supports abolishing the death penalty), Brody was most moved by the play’s portrayal of finding hope within bleak circumstances.

It’s a theme he’s previously explored in his Oscar-winning performances in The Brutalist and The Pianist—the former had a man who uses architecture to process the trauma of being in a concentration camp, while the latter had a composer who plays music to survive during the Holocaust. In a similar vein, Nick in The Fear of 13 is able to maintain his sanity in prison through reading and writing; he read as many as three books in a day. He even writes a letter that is so moving, it inspires a judge to reopen his case.

Brody has a deep reverence for artistic expression (he paints large-scale pop art-inspired works in his spare time). It’s something he credits to his mother. “So much that I can’t process or can’t understand, I've poured into the work. My mother's quite similar in that sense, and her devotion to her work in an artistic and a creative capacity has always been pretty awe-inspiring. It's definitely something I relate to. And it is something that I think is quite universally wonderful: how the human spirit can persevere through immersion into some form of creativity and how that can bring hope and transport us out of the horrors around us. And help us find purpose and ways of expressing our soul that is being crushed from the oppressive forces around us.”

Brody takes his devotion to physical extremes sometimes. In his 20s for The Pianist, he lost nearly 30 pounds. For the 2010 film Wrecked, Brody ate worms and was physically thrown into a white rapids river in the middle of winter in Canada. Luckily, The Fear of 13 doesn’t require him to go too Method. Instead, the challenge is mental: how to get into Nick’s torturous mindset, where he becomes so defeated that he asks to be executed, every night in front of a live audience.

That’s where research comes in. When he did the play in London, Brody visited a maximum security prison. He also met a Japanese man who had been wrongfully imprisoned for over 60 years. So when Brody was on that stage, he kept that man in his head: “I kept thinking about the shame on his family and this poor little 80-something-year-old man in a bowler hat and a black suit being released from prison, hobbling out after his entire adult life was taken from him because the detective had planted evidence ... There's a segment on the stage where my character, Nick, is just wiped out from the bureaucracy and the ongoing lack of hope. And I would lay there every night and think about this man every night. Every night.” He swallows, then says softly, sadly, “It still breaks my heart. And this is one of many, many people.”

Now on Broadway, Brody is thinking about the people wrongfully imprisoned by ICE, like the owner of a Chinese restaurant he frequents in Upstate New York. While it’s dubious whether art can change public policy, it’s the one tool that Brody has to try and make sense of “the things that torment me about the world around me.”

Here, Brody speaks hesitantly, finding his way to the answer to a big question: What is the role of art in today's bleak times? “Art is an ability to speak in, almost an additional language. Within you, you have all these yearnings to understand and express things that are hard to express. And you can find them through seeing an image that brings incongruous elements together in a way that speaks to an overall picture. And it's subjective, but you find some kind of light or enlightenment.” 

He continues on, speaking more steadily now and passionately: “And this is what great writers do, they hear it and see it and extract it and reinterpret it. And actors are required to find within themselves, and in the circumstances of others, opportunities to explore terrain that is very familiar, or not—but that resonates and enables us to connect. Musicians find ways of expressing all kinds of emotions that are evoking emotions from the listener. And painters can speak volumes with a brush stroke. I think all of it is both the kind of personal yearnings of the artist and the communal yearnings of people who are curious to find answers or hope or meaningful discourse.”

So it's a micro effect that hopefully ripples outward towards the macro. For the Broadway run, The Fear of 13 producers have teamed up with The Innocence Project, a non-profit that works to free people who are wrongfully imprisoned—including Nick Yarris, who has thoroughly approved of Brody’s portrayal of him. He’s been a frequent presence at previews on Broadway, telling a crowd at the stage door, “I just witnessed perfection. The play isn’t about justice. It’s about the beautiful gifts that women bring to the darkest place in the world.”

For Brody, working with Yarris on the play has been particularly gratifying. It’s impossible to say how many lives are changed by a piece of art, but for now, Brody is grateful that it has changed at least one. “He has such a wonderful, generous approach to his own circumstances and to others: Both in one hand saying, ‘Hey, I'm hard to kill.’ And then another hand saying, ‘I wouldn't be the kind of person I am. I wouldn't even be here had I not been put through these other hardships.’ To know this man….” 

The actor sighs, visibly moved, before continuing. “To have an individual that I'm assigned to represent feel so represented and tell me that it's providing healing for him is incredibly rewarding and just feels like the best use of all of our energy.”