Early in Adrien Brody’s career, he was shooting a movie in Prague.
One character in the film had to jump off Prague’s famous Charles Bridge, a long 14th century stone span whose surface sits approximately 43 feet above the Vitava River.
“A stuntman was doing the jumps,” Brody recalls. “They did multiple takes and he was paid per jump.
“I was young at the time, I wasn’t working very much. And I remember thinking maybe I should do that myself.”
Fast-forward some number of years. Brody, now approaching 40, is playing magician and escape artist Harry Houdini in a miniseries for the History channel.
In the opening scene of the four-hour series, which premieres Monday and Tuesday nights at 9 on History, Houdini plunges off a much higher bridge, dropping through a hole chopped in the ice over a frozen river. Did we mention he’s bound in iron shackles?
Brody is known for getting deeply into his characters. He learned ventriloquism for his role in “The Dummy” and he learned to play the piano for the 2003 film “The Pianist,” which made him, at 29, the youngest man ever to win an Academy Award for best actor.
In the case of Houdini, however, he decided not to immerse himself in high-altitude bridge jumping.
“The Charles Bridge was about my limit,” he says with a laugh. “I wouldn’t jump off, say, the Brooklyn Bridge. But that scene tells you a lot about Houdini. He did some dangerously crazy stuff.”
That part of Houdini, Brody likes. In fact, Brody likes a lot of things about Houdini, and has for most of his life.
Growing up in Woodhaven, Queens, he earned a few dollars and a neighborhood reputation by working up a magic act and playing children’s birthday parties as “The Amazing Adrien.”
Asked if playing Houdini is a backdoor way to get back into the game, he laughs again.
“The magic continues,” he intones. “One more time.”
In truth, it was around his teen years that acting eclipsed magic.
“I found I preferred embodying someone else for a short period of time,” Brody says. “And I’ve been very fortunate over the years, playing all these people who are so different from each other and from me.”
Still, like anyone who delved into magic, he never lost his affection for Houdini.
“He was an inspiration,” says Brody, and the depth of that inspiration became clearer once he signed on for the miniseries.
“He’s a fascinating person,” Brody says, and the miniseries delves into everything from his dependence on his mother to being recruited by the U.S. government as an espionage agent when he went on tour through Europe in the years before World War I.
“The more I learned about him, the more I wanted to convey the complexity of his character,” says Brody. “I shuddered at the responsibility of representing someone I admired so much, and who was so different from me.”
One of the goals of the miniseries, says executive producer Gerald W. Abrams, was to show the human dimension of someone who became almost a caricature.
“You have to understand how big he was in his day,” says Abrams. “There are magicians we admire today, like Penn and Teller or David Blaine, but Houdini was just bigger.
“You see him with Charlie Chaplin, or with President Taft. It’s a little like Babe Ruth.”
The fact his name is still synonymous with seemingly impossible escapes a century later attests to his stature, Abrams says — and that time gap gave the producers and writers of the miniseries a little leeway in the writing.
The bridge jump, for instance, which was filmed at the Eads Bridge in Detroit, melds together a couple of separate tricks Houdini performed.
He was fond of jumping off bridges in shackles, including the Willis Avenue Bridge and several others around New York. He did jump off the Belle Isle Bridge in Detroit in 1906.
But the river wasn’t frozen that day. He did the frozen river trick on another occasion, when he was lowered through a hole in the ice and escaped.
“They’re all tricks he either did or had planned ways to do,” says Abrams. “But since this was four or five generations ago, there’s no one around to say it didn’t really happen the way we show it.
“What’s important to me is whether it helps tell the story. Does it make any sense? Do I care?”
In any case, says Abrams, the trump card here is Brody.
“You never tired of watching him,” says Abrams. “I’ve watched this a couple of hundred times and every time, each scene he does keeps getting better.”
“Houdini” also spends considerable time on Houdini’s relationship with his wife Bess (Kristen Connolly), whom he met when she was a showgirl and married days later.
She works in his act, joining his long-time assistant Jim Collins (Evan Jones) in setting the stage and figuratively rolling the drums for Houdini’s entrance.
She becomes increasingly concerned about his obsession with his work,and tries to prevent him from doing anything too dangerous — which is, of course, exactly what he constantly aspires to do.
“He had to be the greatest,” says Brody. “He had to stand out. He felt that’s why he was here. And yet at the same time he was insecure.”
That all adds to the complexity of the character, says Brody. But he also suggests the reason Houdini was so popular in his day, and remains a popular reference across all of American culture these many years later, was more fundamental.
“What Houdini was doing, and what he represented to everyone who saw him,” says Brody, “was overcoming obstacles.
“In his own life he overcame the shackles of poverty. He came from an immigrant family that certainly faced anti-Semitism.
“But he broke free of all that. By his skill and determination he became an iconic American performer. He embodied the American dream.
“I think that’s what he represented to all people, but maybe most importantly to the working class. He stood for overcoming all the challenges, surmounting all the obstacles.”
So jumping off a bridge wasn’t just a stunt. It was facing down something hard, maybe even dangerously crazy, and beating it.
Brody says that in the course of the filming he discovered that while he still admired Houdini, he didn’t share all Houdini’s drive.
Houdini, for instance, always felt his next trick had to be bigger and more spectacular than the last.
In Brody’s field, that’s not realistic — or else he would have had to spend the last decade continually topping “The Pianist.”
“You’d love to, of course,” he says. “But Houdini could create whatever thing he felt would catapult him to another level. I can only work with what’s put on the table in front of me.
“Not to say much of the material I’ve done hasn’t been inspirational, which it has…. But when you had the privilege of playing in a film as complex and powerful as ‘The Pianist,’ working with a genius like Roman Polanski, and then to receive such praise at a young age, that’s all something it would be hard to improve on.”
It might take, well, Houdini.
