Adrian joins the Arnie game (From The Northern Echo)

Adrian joins the Arnie game

12:39pm Thursday 8th July 2010 in

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Predators stars Adrian Brody as an unlikely action man. Steve Pratt reports.

OSCAR-winning actor Adrian Brody is the new Arnold Schwarzenegger.

An unlikely thought, but one we must consider with the arrival of the rebooting of Eighties monster movie Predators.

Brody is the leading man in this horror thriller and doesn’t view it as that far from the dramatic roles he’s played in the past. It isn’t so much the challenge that motivates him but the possibility that he may become redundant in his work that fuelled his desire to be part of Team Predators.

“If I repeat myself, I would assume people who watch my work lose interest and I would lose interest,” he says.

It’s important for him to make movies that people can enjoy and he can enjoy the process of making. “That’s what this is for me. It’s like I’m playing here. This is fun,”

he says. “I made a conscious effort in my entire career to find different roles. I loved the original Predator. I remember seeing that film when I was a kid with my friends and how exciting that was to be in a theatre. I love sci-fi horror movies.”

So here’s an action hero who’s more brains than buff.

Brody reckons that soldiers, although some have incredible physiques, look more like him than massive bodybuilders “Physically you have to fit the bill, but you don’t have to necessarily be a bodybuilder to tackle a situation like that.

When you see the original, you see the physical condition that Arnold was in.

It was so powerful and kind of inspirational. That had a lot to do with his character. Here was this amazing superhuman guy in this situation. It’s one approach, but it does not necessarily have to be the only approach.”

What was liberating about playing Royce was being someone with a clearly defined agenda, namely to stop the creatures on the alien planet killing him.

So where does Brody’s inner killer reside? “I don’t know. That’s what makes me good at what I do. Whatever turmoil that fuels me, I’ve fortunately found something creative to channel it. And I don’t think it’s my own,” he explains.

Brody finds it interesting to psych himself up to play life and death games, to raise the stakes where there’s a lot riding on it. “I’ve played paintball. I’ve made it pretty intense for myself where I can’t get hit, you know?

When you get hit it’s really devastating, but that’s exciting,” he says.

He found the reality of the process when making Peter Jackson’s new version of King Kong. “I mean running from King Kong? It’s on the page. When I read that, I said ‘oh this is going to be really fun. I’ve always wanted to do a movie like this’,” he recalls.

“It’s actually very difficult.

You have to tap into the fear of running from something that is incredibly dangerous and make that believable at the same time. You’ve got to find some level of truth to that. When it’s over, there’s a kind of a wave of calm that washes over you.”

It’s his responsibility to look the part. “You can’t act thin and you also can’t act buff. If a character needs to be strong, you have to get there, and if a character needs to be malnourished, you have to get there.

“And if a character needs to be out of shape, you have to be willing to do that and cast vanity aside and represent the person that you’re playing. That’s a challenge in every role.

“The nature of doing an action-oriented film is that it’s strenuous physically. I have a real weapon on me, I’ve got ammo packs, I’ve got a ton of gear on me. If my character is flipping through the trees, I may not be falling through trees, but I’m on a device with all my gear, flipping around.

“There are all those physical things, which is very exciting. They’re really fun but those are different challenges from what you’d have in other films.”

Brody’s aware of the Predator fans and how they’ll react to the new film. He refuses to make comparisons to the other films, saying the goal was to draw from the “purity” of the first Predator and the hardcore action and suspense.

“It was the birth of that style of movie-making. We’re some twenty-odd years later, technology has improved. We have more at our disposal to make it even a greater, more intense journey.”

■ Predators (15) is out now.