Adrien Brody has finally found his first lead role following the Best Actor Oscar win for The Brutalist. Brody will star with Rachel Zegler and Ben Platt in father/daughter drama Last Dance from Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz.
Written by Emily Ziff Griffin and based on her New Yorker article, Last Dance is set in 1991 and follows a Broadway composer played by Brody, who takes his daughter on a gay Caribbean cruise while he secretly grapples with AIDS.
Platt will also provide original music for the film, with Zegler performing the new songs. We know how talented both of them are musically from their many works on stage and screen. Zegler earned a Golden Globe Best Actress win for her performance in West Side Story. Platt has won two Tony Awards.
There has been a lot of attention on what Brody would do next following The Brutalist. Notably, he made a bunch of sketchy choices following his Best Actor win for The Pianist in 2001. He was much pickier this time around, even going so far as to back out of S. Craig Zahler’s The Bookie and the Bruiser. Joining with an acclaimed filmmaker such as Aïnouz, who won Un Certain Regard in 2019 for The Invisible Life, seems like a good idea on paper. That said, Aïnouz’s last three films, Firebrand, Motel Destino, and this year’s Rosebush Pruning, haven’t been as well-received. I enjoyed Firebrand, though, and interviewed Aïnouz about it.
