Rise to Fame
At 29, he became the youngest actor to win Best Actor at the Oscars, for The Pianist (2002). Roman Polanski cast him after seeing him in Harrison's Flowers. The preparation was extreme: he gave up his apartment and car, cut off his phone, learned piano four hours a day, and starved himself down to around 130 pounds. He has said he later developed PTSD and an eating disorder from the experience. The role fit him like it was tailored.
In the Spotlight
The 22 years between his two Oscars weren't exactly a triumph. He was the youngest Best Actor winner, but the roles that followed, King Kong, Predators, a string of Wes Anderson supporting parts, never matched that height. He's said he walked away from acting entirely around 2016. The return came through smaller TV work on Succession and Winning Time before Brady Corbet cast him in The Brutalist (2024). He won Best Actor again, plus the Golden Globe and BAFTA, becoming the rare actor with two nominations and two wins. Whether he takes that momentum somewhere or sits on it is still an open question.
Side Notes
His mother is Sylvia Plachy, a Hungarian-born photographer who fled Hungary after the 1956 Soviet crackdown. His father is a Polish Jewish history teacher who lost relatives in the Holocaust. The family tree explains why he walked into The Pianist with something more than method acting; the history was already in the room. Before any of that, he spent his childhood doing magic shows at birthday parties as "The Amazing Adrien," which is either a great origin story or a sign he was always going to find a way to perform.