For the second time in his busy cinematic career crowned with two Oscars, actor Adrien Brody meets in front of one camera with his colleague in successes and awards, Sean Penn. 28 years after “The Thin Red Line,” which brought them together in 1998, they stand before the lens of director Doug Liman to present the movie “Snake Island,” which is currently being filmed in Croatia.
The film recalls the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines deep in the Baltic Sea in September 2022, one of the most controversial incidents in the context of the Ukrainian-Russian war. The film tells the story of a secret team of Ukrainian divers who embark on a dangerous underwater mission, in light of escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine.
Film championships and awards are not the only common denominator between Brody and Ben. The two are known for adopting a method of methodical acting, in which the actor goes to extremes while preparing for the role. Perhaps Brody's latest experiments in this context are among the most difficult and strange.
5 months isolation in a hotel
The curtain fell on Broadway weeks ago on the first theatrical work presented by American actor Adrien Brody (53 years old) in his career. For the character “Nick Yaris,” based on a true story, the actor went through one of the harshest experiences an artist can experience, so he committed himself to complete isolation from people for 5 months.
In the play “The Fear of 13”, Brody plays the character of a prisoner who spent 22 years behind bars awaiting death sentence for a murder he did not commit. In preparation for performing this realistic character, the actor isolated himself in a hotel room for 5 consecutive months, except for Sundays when he went out to visit his family.
In an interview with “Interview” magazine about this unique experience, Brody said that there was “a need to sacrifice some comforts and freedoms for roles like these,” adding that it was not the first time he had done something like this, and it would not be the last.
When Brody went on a starvation diet
Just as Brody said, the play was not the first artistic work for which he prepared in the harshest manner. Perhaps the most difficult exercise he underwent in this context was during his preparation for the character of “Vladislav Szpilman” in the movie “The Pianist,” for which he won his first Oscar in 2002.
Brody said in his interview with “Interview” that what he experienced at that time was not comparable to any other experience: “I put all my things in a warehouse and left my home. I sold my car and turned off my phone. I stopped listening to the music I loved, like hip-hop, and immersed myself in classical music. I learned to play Chopin, and I went on a starvation diet. It was a radical transformation. When the film finished, I had to rebuild my life from scratch.”
This is all Adrien Brody did for that legendary film. He lost 14 kilograms in 6 weeks; Because he had to appear very thin as a result of the starved personality test. However, he did not starve himself just to lose weight; Rather, in order to touch the true meaning of hunger, and embody “Zebelman’s” despair as it really is.
As for studying the piano, he took it very seriously, and practiced for hours every day. However, this experience did not pass without consequences. He entered into a wave of depression, insomnia, and post-traumatic stress disorder, which continued for a year after the completion of filming, due to the physical and emotional transformations he went through.
Brody is a prisoner of the jacket
Among the extreme experiences that Adrien Brody went through was during the preparation of the movie “The Jacket” in 2005. At that time, he played the character of a soldier who participated in the Gulf War, and was placed in a psychiatric hospital by mistake. He asked the staff to lock him up and leave him shackled inside a real restraint vest, the kind used on patients in neurological facilities. He practiced this exercise for long periods between scenes, in an effort to test the feeling of claustrophobia and helplessness that the character suffers from.
Military recruitment
To prepare for his character in the 1998 war drama The Thin Red Line, Adrien Brody participated in a military training camp and went through all the exercises required of soldiers. On the psychological preparation front, he put himself in a state of constant fear. He invested so much in this feeling that the character “Sergeant Geoffrey Fife” entailed, to the point that he could not easily get rid of fear after filming ended.
Thorns hairstyle in the streets of New York
When director Spike Lee offered him the character of rock singer Richie in the 1999 film Summer of Sam, Adrien Brody was still an up-and-coming actor. But since then, he had decided to adopt a systematic acting method in preparation for his roles.
He did not know anything about punk rock music before that role, but he immersed himself in this culture and received daily lessons in playing the electric guitar. He also radically changed his appearance, and began to go out to the streets of New York and meet people with his famous spiky hairstyle and blonde mane, wearing “punk” clothes and assuming the character.
Brody eats ants and worms
During his preparation for the character of “Private Royce” in the movie “The Predators” in 2010, Brody’s preparations were not limited to reading books about military exercises and delving into Buddhist teachings. He was spending a lot of time in the woods; He slept alone, and was subjected to rigorous exercise 6 days a week. For that role, Brody had to lift 10 kilograms.
In his acting career that extends since childhood, Adrien Brody has never abandoned his extreme technique in preparing for roles. If the second Oscar for the movie “The Brutalist” (2024) cost him learning the Hungarian language, then the movie “Wrecked” in 2010 made him go to the extreme of physical realism. He ate live ants and worms in front of the camera, while portraying the character of a man who wakes up with amnesia, trapped in a wrecked car in the middle of a forest.
The Egyptian government recently adopted a plan to green Cairo, after sharp criticism over cutting down ancient trees on the famous “Gameet El Dewal” Street in Giza. The governorates of Cairo and Giza announced the reforestation of the streets with thousands of new trees, which raised criticism and questions about the feasibility of planting new trees and their ability to replace the cut ones.
Giza Governorate announced the start of new afforestation works within the “100 Million Trees” initiative, stressing that the expansion of agriculture will take place according to scientific principles that take into account the selection of species appropriate to climatic conditions, in addition to developing mechanisms for tree maintenance and irrigation to ensure their sustainability.
The moves in Giza coincide with a similar expansion in Cairo. Cairo Governor Ibrahim Saber said, during a tour by Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly on Sunday, that the governorate aims to plant one million plants within a year, including 60,000 trees, with no less than 1,500 trees in each neighborhood according to its area and the places available for planting, in addition to 800,000 plants and shrubs.
Saber added that the governorate has already planted more than “3,000 trees and about 700,000 shrubs and plants,” noting that a specialized consulting office has been used to develop a afforestation plan and choose appropriate species.
However, Dr. Nader Nour El-Din, professor of lands and water at the Faculty of Agriculture, Cairo University, believes that replacing old trees “cannot be measured by the number of new trees alone,” and that the issue is related to the type of trees chosen, their age, and the environmental function they perform within the city. He criticized that “some of the new trees that began to be planted to replace old trees did not take into account in their selection the environmental functions that the felled trees performed, including providing shade and reducing temperatures,” citing the planting of “palm trees in some locations instead of trees with wide crowns.”
Nour El-Din told Asharq Al-Awsat that palm trees do not provide shade and do not reduce heat in the way that shade trees do. He explained that landscaping in cities is supposed to take into account providing shade during the summer, renewing the air and reducing the impact of car exhausts, in addition to the aesthetic dimension, by choosing flowering species that are compatible with the streets.
The difficulty of compensation, according to Nour El-Din, does not stop at choosing the type of trees, but rather extends to the large time difference between the uprooted trees and the seedlings that replace them. He cites what happened in the Mohandiseen area (west of Cairo), saying that “the smallest tree uprooted in Mohandiseen was about 70 years old,” and that the old trees in the area have built up a stable root system over decades, while new trees begin with limited roots and need years to reach a similar state.
He adds that new trees need regular care and irrigation “for a period of not less than ten years,” so that their roots can extend and settle in the soil, which, in his opinion, makes “the numerical comparison between the trees that have been removed and the new seedlings that are planted unequal.” A seedling, once planted, does not compensate for what a tree that was decades old had provided in terms of shade, green mass, and relief from heat and car exhaust.
Nour El-Din believes that the problem extends to the absence of a single entity that manages the tree file according to an integrated plan, noting that responsibility is still divided between the localities and the Ministry of Agriculture, although, in his opinion, dealing with perennial trees requires specialized agricultural supervision that determines what can be preserved or moved and what is necessary to remove.
The Minister of Local Development and Environment, Manal Awad, had directed, at the beginning of this September, to inventory the trees that were cut down on League of Arab States Street and Mustafa Mahmoud Square, and to determine the reasons for their removal instead of moving them, and to replace them in double numbers, while choosing types appropriate to the nature of the place and development work.
In its latest plan, Cairo Governorate is moving towards adopting more specific standards in dealing with afforestation. During this month, it announced the use of experts and specialists, and then a consulting office, to choose species suitable for the Egyptian environment, with a focus on trees that consume little water, in addition to preserving existing trees and not pruning them except when necessary and in accordance with technical standards.
For his part, agricultural engineer Ahmed Hilal says: “It is impossible for new trees to replace trees that preceded them by decades,” explaining that “an old tree has needed many years to form a stable root system in the soil, in parallel with the growth of the trunk, crown, and leaf area, while new seedlings begin a growth cycle that requires years before forming a similar green mass.”
Hilal added to Asharq Al-Awsat: “Egypt has a stock of perennial trees, and removing trees should not be treated as an inevitable result of development projects,” noting that “seeking planning and agricultural expertise before implementing projects would have reduced the amount of losses, in light of the existence of scientific methods for dealing with old trees and preserving them.”
He believes that the difference is not only related to the age of the tree, but rather to what it has become “performing after years of growth. The size of the shoot, the width of the crown, and the extension of the roots are factors that make the environmental impact of a mature tree different from the impact of a new seedling, even if large numbers of them are planted, which makes the compensation process related to time and not to the number of trees planted.”
Egyptian actor Hisham Ashour said that the character “Ghaleb”, which he plays in the series “High Value Target”, represents an important turning point in his artistic career. Because it pushed him to discover a new aspect of his experience as an actor, explaining that he discovered during preparation for the role that he not only loves complex characters, but also finds himself passionate about their details and the way they are built, especially when the character needs to study different techniques to reach his inner motivations.
Hisham Ashour added in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat that the difficulty of the character of “Ghaleb” came from the fact that he does not move in one direction. He is an Iraqi officer who needs a strict and strong presence, but at the same time he carries a religious background and a special position on the events that Iraq experienced during that stage, pointing out that building the character required him to search for the human space that exists behind the image of the officer, so that he does not turn into a mere tool within the events or a stereotypical model for a military character.
He stressed that building the role of “Ghalib” did not depend on watching models of Iraqi officers in Hollywood films or previous works, because he deliberately did not associate the character with a ready-made image that he had previously seen, but rather relied on his experiences that he gained from life, travel, and contact with different cultures, in addition to his careful reading of the scenes, indicating that he tried to explain “Ghalib” from within himself, and to reach his intentions and motives through the text itself.
“The Target” series is a suspenseful drama of 8 episodes, dealing with the investigations that followed the arrest of the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in December 2003, and is based on the memoirs of John Nixon, the CIA analyst who led his interrogation sessions, to reconstruct one of the most complex stages of the American invasion of Iraq through the confrontations and investigations that took place after his arrest.
He believed that the real challenge was not only in presenting “Ghalib” as an Iraqi officer, but in showing his humanity and the complexity of his relationship with his country and the parties around him. He explained that the character has a position on Saddam Hussein’s regime, but at the same time he is an Iraqi character and has feelings for his homeland, and this contradiction was important to him. Because it proves that a political or sectarian position cannot sum up a person completely.
Performance tests
He explained that his choice of the character “Ghalib” came after a long journey of performance tests, after he later learned that more than 30 actors of different nationalities were competing for the role, including Americans, Iraqis, Lebanese and others, pointing out that the stages of the test began with self-recording, then a test in front of the director, before arriving at the third test in front of director Leslie Greif.
He attributed the difficulty of the last test to being required to perform long scenes in front of a large group of workers, then repeat the scene again in a different way, explaining that the actor may feel after the first time that he gave everything he had, but repeating the scene puts him before a new test, but he came out of the experience with a strong feeling that he gave what he could, before waiting two or three months without knowing the result.
Hisham Ashour said that the arrival of the news of his selection for the role was a very happy moment for him, especially since the path to this global experience began for him years ago, and that standing inside an American location made him regain an old dream that he had been working for since 2012, while emphasizing that the difference in language, place, and nature of the work itself made the experience carry a special feeling for him, beyond just participating in a new series.
He said that working alongside Swedish-American actor Joel Kinnaman added a lot to his performance, explaining that Kinnaman was not only present as an actor, but was also a producer of the work, and possessed precise knowledge of camera movement and how to manage the scene.
He pointed out that some of his simple observations during filming opened up new spaces in the performance, stressing that dealing with a professional actor of this level makes you learn even in moments when the learning is not direct.
He believed that dealing with the story of Iraq within a global dramatic production inherently imposes a multiplicity of viewpoints, explaining that the work cannot, from his point of view, present Iraq or the United States as either of them is completely right all the time, and that the viewer knows part of the historical context, but there are many aspects of the story of the invasion, the investigations, and what happened in that period that are still unknown to large segments of the public, which makes presenting more than one angle essential.
He stressed that in the end, the actor remains committed to the text presented by the work, even when he has his own vision regarding some details, explaining that his presence within a global production system means respecting the vision of the director and the script.
He said that one of the most difficult challenges of the experience was not related to the performance alone, but rather to what he was physically exposed to while filming the long scene. He explained that he fell after filming the first part of the scene, and was seriously injured. The first thing he thought at the moment of his fall was that the dream he had been working for since 2012 had ended, before he discovered that he had to complete the rest of the scene despite the injury.
