How did Adrien Brody use AI? Looming controversy casts shadow over actor's Best Actor win at Oscars 2025 

American actor Adrien Brody took home the Best Actor in a Leading Role award at the Oscars 2025, held on March 2, 2025, at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, Los Angeles. He won his second Academy Award for his performance in the 2024 epic period drama The Brutalist.

In the wake of his victory, several users across social media alleged that Adrien Brody used artificial intelligence (AI) for his voice in his role as László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor and architect in the film. Many drew comparisons to Timothée Chalamet and claimed he was robbed of the Best Actor award for his 2024 Bob Dylan biography, A Complete Unknown, despite Brody seemingly using AI for his voice.

According to Forbes, Adrien’s director, Brady Corbet, only used the AI voice-cloning tool ‘Respeecher’ to “tweak” the actor’s accent when he spoke Hungarian—a language he doesn’t know but is supposed to speak as a native according to the plot of The Brutalist.

The outlet noted that most of his dialogues were in English which involved no artificial intelligence.

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Adrien Brody and others have addressed the AI controversy surrounding The Brutalist

During a February 2025 appearance on the Little Gold Men podcast at Vanity Fair, Adrien Brody addressed the ongoing AI controversy surrounding The Brutalist. He stated that the situation had been taken out of context.

“I understand that we live in a time where even just the mention of AI is a bit triggering. We live in a time where, unfortunately, things can get misappropriated quite easily on the internet and I just wish people had more understanding of the context and facts of the circumstances,” he shared.

Adrien Brody, whose mother was born in Hungary, credited his director, Brady Corbet, for explaining how AI was used on several occasions, adding that he was “happy” the latter managed to “clarify a lot in his remarks.”

“First of all, I’m the son of Hungarians and grew up with that language spoken in my home. I actually even integrated, within the Hungarian dialogue, curse words that weren’t in the script… Obviously, his post-production process only touched some lines spoken in Hungarian,” Adrien claimed.

He continued to explain that none of the “dialect” was altered by AI, but rather with the assistance of the film’s dialect coach, Tanera Marshall. Adrien Brody described the filmmaker as "very sensitive and thoughtful” and assured that “no technology [was] implemented that takes work from people.”

“It’s quite a typical post-production process. I think we all know the truth,” the 51-year-old New Yorker concluded.

Brady Corbet explained to Deadline last month that an AI-powered Ukrainian voice synthesizer software called ‘Respeecher’ was used during post-production. He reiterated his lead actor's claim regarding the dialect coach, stating that all of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ “performances are completely their own” and they “worked for months” with Tanera Marshall “to perfect their accents.

“Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed. This was a manual process, done by our sound team and Respeecher in post-production,” Corbet added.

He also mentioned that the goal was to “preserve the authenticity” of the actors’ performances in another language and “not to replace or alter them," asserting that everything was “done with the utmost respect for the craft."

Similarly, editor Dávid Jancsó informed Red Shark News in a January interview that most of the Hungarian dialogue spoken by Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones contained “a part of me talking in there,” with the aim of using proper pronunciations.

“We were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there. You can do this in ProTools yourself, but we had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process otherwise we’d still be in post,” he explained.

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The Brutalist received 10 nominations at the 97th Academy Awards and won three, including Adrien Brody’s Best Actor award, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score. This marked Brody’s second Oscar win; he previously won Best Actor in 2003 for his role as Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski's The Pianist.

In addition to the AI controversy, Forbes reported that Adrien faced criticism and ridicule online for his method acting and lengthy Oscars acceptance speech.