Charlie Vickers had a hunch. The then-27-year-old Australian actor had his suspicions that the mysterious human character he was playing on Amazon’s ambitious new Lord of the Rings series, The Rings of Power, was actually Sauron. The series, after all, had been billed as a prequel following the forging of the Rings of Power during Middle-earth’s Second Age — the era characterized by Sauron’s rise to power and his reign of terror that would only be ended by the War of the Last Alliance.

“You go through the cast list, and when you looked at the time period that this show would be set in, you knew that Sauron was going to be there,” Vickers tells Inverse. “So we thought he must be somewhere in disguise.”

Vickers and the rest of the cast put their heads together and narrowed down their list of suspects. At the top of that list was Halbrand, the Southlands refugee played by Vickers, who was a brand-new character invented for the show. “When I was doing the raft scenes, I had no idea,” Vickers says. “I think maybe subconsciously I was playing a little bit of, ‘There might be more than meets the eye to this character.’”

Vickers has proven there’s certainly more than meets the eye to him with his major transformation in Season 2. In this extensive interview, Inverse goes deep with the one performance to rule them all in 2024.

In one of the opening shots of The Brutalist, the Statue of Liberty looms over a boat of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, the skewed angle by which Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) views it making the iconic statue appear upside down. It holds all the majesty and awe that American immigrants feel upon seeing the country’s most iconic landmark, but something is slightly off — literally askew. It’s a fitting introduction to director Brady Corbet’s towering post-World War II historical drama about the hollow nature of the American Dream, and the devastating sacrifices made in pursuit of it.

“It's really [about] the paradox of the immigrant struggle,” Adrien Brody tells Inverse. “And how incongruous the American Dream is with the hopes and dreams of the vast majority of people that flee hardship and oppression, that come to this great nation in hopes of assimilating and being welcomed as Americans, and yet are not.”

As László, Brody gives the performance of his career — looking perpetually gaunt and hungry, but with a glint of steel in his eyes, a hint of this ambitious architect’s stubborn pursuit of perfection. It feels like a performance that Brody has been working toward his whole career — a role that synthesizes the real-life inspiration from his mother, a Hungarian immigrant whose memories of fleeing war and carving out a career as an artist in America proved “invaluable” to Brody, and his first Oscar-winning role in The Pianist, in which Brody played real life Jewish pianist and Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman.

At the very least, the two roles feel like they’re in conversation with each other — a shared DNA that I point out to Brody in an interview with him ahead of the release of The Brutalist.

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