Adrien Brody attends the 97th Annual Oscars Nominees Dinner. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/WireImage)
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It must be a strange day for Adrien Brody. The American actor won his second Best Actor Oscar for his role in The Brutalist, but then, right after this historic moment, was mocked by sections of social media.
After receiving his golden statue at the 97th Academy Awards, many people went online to make memes and crack jokes about Adrien Brody, covering everything from his performance in movies to his acceptance speech.
This specific reaction from a subsection of social media shows how meme culture can focus its ire in an unfair way on a single individual. There’s little way of predicting or managing who this falls on, but it’s become part of the online world, and something famous people simply have to learn how to deal with.
Won Best Actor At The 2025 Oscars? And What Did Adrien Brody Do?
The most eye-catching winner of the 97th Academy Awards was Anora, which picked up five trophies, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Mikey Madison. But following that, one of the other big stories was Adrien Brody being given the Best Actor award for his starring role in The Brutalist.
This epic drama move was directed and co-written by Brady Corbet, and Brody plays László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor and architect. The Brutalist received rave reviews, and many tipped Brody to pick up his second Oscar for his performance, something he duly did.
Holding two Best Actor awards puts Brody in exalted territory, alongside Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, and Anthony Hopkins. Only Daniel Day-Lewis (with three Best Actor Oscars) has more in this category.
At this stage, one would expect the online world to be united celebrating Adrien Brody’s achievement—but that’s not one of the dominant stories online.
The Online Response To Adrien Brody Winning Best Actor At The 2025 Oscars
“What a wild career Adrien Brody has had,” says one user, “he’s like the Eli Manning of acting, he’s somehow won two of these and mostly thrown a lot of interceptions otherwise.”
On this topic, other uses dug up some of these pictures that were less than well-reviewed:
The rationale here, on some level at least, appears to be trying to discount him winning Best Actor as more of a piece of happenstance, rather than consistent talent. But this was hardly the only way some people online poked fun at Adrien Brody.
Another common cause of complaint was his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards. Despite some people on YouTube saying “this man is a poet” in response to his words, others made comments such as “[he] can’t respect the boundaries of the Oscars” by taking up loads of time during his talk.
This lead to some memes connecting the intermission in The Brutalist to the length of his acceptance speech:
Finally, another common source of mockery online was the use of AI on his voice in The Brutalist.
One user, for example, compared this to Timothée Chalamet, who “after taking singing lessons for five years, after gaining weight, he did everything he could to deliver the best character possible, only to lose to Adrien Brody, who used AI.”
This isn’t the fairest approach, as artificial intelligence was only used to tweak the actors’ accents when they were speaking Hungarian, a language Brody is meant to be a native speaker of in the movie, but isn’t in real life—not his accent in English, which is what’s in the bulk of the movie.
Fairness, though, isn’t always front of mind when sections of social media sets its sights on certain actors.
Why Is Adrien Brody Being Mocked Online After His Best Actor Oscar Win?
A quick note: this piece aims to examine why Adrien Brody is being mocked, not that the only reaction online is making fun of him. While this might be a prominent part of what’s happening on social media, there are also many people praising him.
With that out of the way, back to the original point: why are people mocking Brody above other actors at the event?
A key element of this can be attributed to his somewhat strange decisions and position as an odd character in Hollywood. When he won his first Best Actor Oscar for The Pianist, he became the youngest ever person to do so.
Since then, though, he has been embroiled in some strange controversies, such as a bizarre performance pretending to be a Jamaican man on Saturday Night Live.
Brody’s approach to method acting (a form of performance that involves full character immersion) has seen him eat ants and worms while filming Wrecked and accidentally develop an easting disorder for The Pianist.
While once seen as a sign of artistry, method acting had a rocky several years, with figures such as Succession’s Brian Cox decrying it and, seemingly, some of the public kicking back against its excesses, which is often used to excuse bad behavior.
When it comes to actors, it’s often those who display unusual tendencies who receive public attention or are made into memes, and, unfortunately for him, this is something that Adrien Brody falls under.
Sometimes, when someone gives off such a serious impression, inverting this is the most amusing thing to do. Memes thrive on this sort of subversion, so there’s an argument to be made that the mocking reaction, the creating of jokes around Adrien Brody’s win, is a kickback against his own behavior and public image.
An interesting part of this is there’s little rhyme or reason about why the response to Brody has been negative. For example, Timothée Chalamet receives a deluge of positivity for operating in a different way to other actors. Yes, he hasn’t been involved in as many controversies as Brody, but it’s just as likely that some of Chalamet’s antics could’ve experienced online ire, yet he’s currently the internet’s golden boy.
Fundamentally, that’s at the heart of this mocking response. Sometimes parts of the internet flows in ways that are uncontrollable and, currently, Brody is the recipient of some of this. Over time it could change—and it likely will—we just don’t know when.
Ultimately, Adrien Brody is unlikely to mind too much that people are making fun of him online. After all, he’s the one with two Best Actor Oscars, while this subsection of social media? Well, that doesn’t have any.
