When Adrien Brody was growing up in Queens, he did magic tricks at kids’ birthday parties.
Billed as “The Amazing Adrien,” he says, “I did pretty advanced stuff. I worked with pyrotechnics at [age] 11. I worked with flash paper. You make something disappear. Me breaking a pencil with a dollar bill.”
As a boy, he idolized Harry Houdini, the great magician and escape artist. “I remember being so impressed by him and his fearlessness and his bravery. He faced death regularly and conquered it,” he says.
Although physically very different from Houdini, Brody’s experience with sleight-of-hand gave him the inside track to playing the escape artist in “Houdini,” the two-part miniseries premiering Monday on History.
Born Ehrich Weiss in Budapest, Hungary, Houdini emigrated with his family to Appleton, Wis. in the late 19th century. “In portraying him I gained a much deeper understanding. He was relentless,” Brody says. “What he overcame was immense. He escaped poverty, anti-Semitism and being an immigrant to becoming the most iconic performer of his time.”
According to “Houdini” executive producer Gerald W. Abrams, the real Harry Houdini looked more like “Sean Penn did 20 years ago,” but Brody’s charm, and the ease with which he performs the role’s strenuous stunts, make any physical discrepancies fall away.
In the miniseries Brody, as Houdini, is locked up in chains, tied to the front end of a cannon and lowered head-first into a replica of the famous Chinese Water Torture Cell.
“It was kind of claustrophobic and dangerous,” Brody says. “There’s no way to keep the water from filling your ears and nose, and the ability to hold on to oxygen for a longer period of time becomes much more challenging. You’re disoriented and you can only turn one way.” Did he actually escape?
“I performed the stunt,” he says. “I was also lowered by a crane with a straitjacket on with no real protection. It was pretty intense. I have great endurance and I do feel pretty nimble.
“But I don’t have the flexibility that [Houdini] possessed. He managed to teach himself how to open locks with his toes.”
Based on the book “Houdini: A Mind in Chains,” by Bernard Meyer (his son, Nicholas, wrote the script), the miniseries was filmed entirely in Budapest, which “has more turn-of-the-century architecture — that’s the 18th century — than almost any city in Western culture. It’s got a lot of patina,” quips Abrams.
It traces Houdini’s career of death-defying stunts from traveling carnival shows to private audiences with Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas II, usually accompanied by his patient wife Bess (Kristen Connolly) and right-hand man Jim Collins (Evan Jones).
Houdini’s ability to speak foreign languages attracts the attention of John Wilkie, director of the US Secret Service who, in the film’s wildest stunt, dispatches Houdini to Europe as a spy working with the MI5 out of London. Abrams freely admits there was nothing “factual” about this episode in the film.
Brody made a different kind of leap. “The challenge is to portray a person that you are in awe of and make him human and complete and give insight into his drive,” he says.
“That’s a bigger challenge than all the physical demands.”