Adrien Brody on March 2, 2025. Photo:
Kevin Winter/Getty
Adrien Brody is this year’s Best Actor at the Academy Awards!
At the 2025 Oscars on Sunday, March 2, the star of The Brutalist took the stage at Los Angeles’ Dolby Theatre and accepted the prize from presenter Cillian Murphy, who won last year’s award for his performance in Oppenheimer.
“Thank you God, thank you for this blessed life,” Brody, 51, said in his speech; the actor previously won Best Actor in 2003 for The Pianist. “If I may just humbly begin by giving thanks for the tremendous outpouring of love… every individual that has treated me with respect and appreciation, I feel so fortunate.”
“You know, acting is a very fragile profession. It looks very glamorous, and in certain moments it is, but the one thing I’ve gained with having the privilege to come back here is some perspective. No matter where you are in your career and what you’ve accomplished, it can all go away,” he added. “And I think what makes this night most special is the awareness of that and the gratitude that I have to still do the work that I love.”
After Brody thanked his management team and The Brutalist‘s writer-director Brady Corbet and writer-producer Mona Fastvold, as well as the rest of the movie’s cast, he said he shared the award “with my amazing partner [Georgina Chapman], who has not only reinvigorated my own self worth but my sense of value and my values and her beautiful children, Dash and India, I know this as been a roller coaster but thank you for accepting me into your life and Popsie’s coming home a winner.”
‘The Brutalist’. Lol Crawley
Brody, the only actor nominated this year with a previous Oscar win to his name, dominated awards season with wins at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, British Academy Film Awards and more for his work leading The Brutalist, which follows a Hungarian immigrant and architect fleeing to the U.S. in the wake of the Holocaust.
Also in the running for the Best Actor prize were Timothée Chalamet for A Complete Unknown, Colman Domingo for Sing Sing, Ralph Fiennes for Conclave and Sebastian Stan for The Apprentice.
‘A Complete Unknown’. Macall Polay/Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Returning to the Oscars as a nominee after 2017’s Call Me by Your Name, Chalamet, 29, led two Best Picture nominees with Dune: Part Two and A Complete Unknown. The latter features the rising star as a 1960s-era Bob Dylan amid the American folk movement in writer-director James Mangold’s hit biopic.
‘Sing Sing’. A24
Domingo, 55, pulled off a rare back-to-back Best Actor nomination feat with his nod for Sing Sing earned only one year after his first nod for Rustin. In Sing Sing, he plays the formerly incarcerated John “Divine G” Whitfield, dramatizing the real-life theater program Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a performance that has earned him recognition from the Gotham Awards, Golden Globes, Film Independent Spirit Awards and more.
Conclave marks the third Oscar nomination for Fiennes, 62, who was also nominated by several other voting bodies. Adapted from Robert Harris’ hit novel, the Edward Berger-directed papal drama imagines a series of twists in the modern-day Vatican City.
‘Conclave’. Courtesy of Focus Features
Stan, 42, had not one but two critically acclaimed performances in contention this awards season; for A Different Man, he won his first Golden Globe, while playing Donald Trump in the Ali Abbasi-directed biopic The Apprentice has earned the Marvel star debuts at the BAFTAs, Spirit Awards and Oscars.
‘The Apprentice’. Courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment & Rich Spirit
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See PEOPLE’s full coverage of the 97th annual Academy Awards, hosted by Conan O’Brien and airing on ABC.
