ADRIEN BRODY FOUND THE PART

The Brutalist is the best, most personal work he's done since The Pianist.

- E. ALEX JUNG

ADRIEN BRODY HAS stopped to contemplate a pile of cardboard. We're walking through London's West End, where he's doing a play, when he spots a few dozen broken-down boxes splayed out on the sidewalk. "That's a great breakdancing platform. That's a gold mine," he says. "It's also a village."

ADRIEN AS A BOY

Brody's mother, Sylvia Plachy, was a longtime photographer at The Village Voice and The New Yorker, and her work can be found at the MoMA and in other collections. Growing up, the actor was often at her side during her magazine assignments and art shows. Here, Plachy shares some photos from her lifelong archive of her favorite muse.

I wait for him to explain. In the couple of hours we've spent together, I've come to learn this is how Brody's mind works, leaping between seemingly unrelated things. Just an hour before, the metallic thunk of a mailbox lid triggered a line from his play, The Fear of 13, spoken when his character, a death-row inmate, receives a letter. And the cardboard sent him down a rabbit hole of the time he went scuba diving without a license when he was 23. It was the night before he left Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, where he had been shooting Terrence Malick's war movie The Thin Red Line. "I'd spent six months playing a guy who's feeling inadequate because of his fears," he says. So he dove into the sea to survey the wreckage of massive Navy ships sunk during the Pacific War to prove he wasn't chickenshit. "That was me being very foolish and young."

Oh right, the cardboard.

1974: Elliot Brody holds his son on his lap in the family's parked car in front of their home in Woodhaven. Their dog Poco peers from the back seat.