Adrien Brody Winning The Best Actor Oscar Again Would Break A Recent Trend

One of the frontrunners for the Academy Award for Best Actor is Adrien Brody for his starring role in The Brutalist, which itself is in contention for Best Picture. Brody has been nominated for the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor and also won the 2025 Golden Globe for Best Drama Performance by a Male Actor. If Brody's hot streak continues into the Academy Awards, and he does end up winning, he will break a recent trend that the award category has seen for the last few years.

The Best Actor Oscar Has Gone To A First-Time Winner The Last 3 Years

The Oscars Have Been Full Of First-Time Winners Recently

The last three Best Actor winners were Cillian Murphy in 2024 for Oppenheimer, Brendan Fraser in 2023 for The Whale, and Will Smith in 2022 for King Richard. All three of these wins are their respective actors' first-time Oscar wins, while Adrien Brody won Best Actor in 2003 for his role in the war drama The Pianist. Interestingly, during the 2003 awards season, Brody didn't win the Golden Globe for Best Actor, and has only now received the award, despite his previous Oscars win.

The winner in 2021 was the always excellent Anthony Hopkins for The Father, and despite him becoming the oldest Oscar winner with that award, he had been given the honor once before, for Silence of the Lambs. It makes sense that so many first-time awards are given out, as there are so many movies released per year, and the chances of performing in the very best projects across multiple years are slim. Despite its theoretical rarity, there are still plenty of actors who receive multiple Oscars throughout their lifetime, making the last three years an interesting occurrence.

Adrien Brody Is Competing Against Multiple Potential First-Time Best Actor Oscar Winners

If The First-Time Streak Continues, Adrien Brody May Be In Trouble

In most of the predictions for the 2025 Oscars, Brody is, surprisingly, the only actor in the running who is a previous Academy Award winner, with the rest of the most likely nominees having never won the award before. The biggest names likeliest to appear alongside Brody are Timothée Chalamet for A Complete Unknown, Colman Domingo for Sing Sing, Ralph Fiennes for Conclave, Daniel Craig for Queer, and Sebastian Stan, who would likely be nominated for The Apprentice over A Different Man.

Considering the Academy's recent track record, Brody may be facing more of an uphill battle, even considering his Globes win. The award is obviously meant to honor the absolute best of the year, but there are many more factors that go into deciding who is going to come out on top. While each of the actors who won in the past three years absolutely deserved the Oscar, seeing someone accept their first Oscar is always extremely heartwarming to see, and that has more than likely factored into the Academy's decisions.

Adrien Brody Likely Needs To Win Best Actor To Keep Another Oscars Record

His Record As The Youngest Best Actor Oscar Holder Is Potentially In Jeopardy

If Brody doesn't manage to win the award, then possible that he will lose the biggest Oscars record that he currently holds to another potential nominee: Timothée Chalamet. Currently, Brody holds the record for the youngest Best Actor Oscar winner with his The Pianist win in 2003, when he was 29 years old. If Chalamet manages to win the award, which is a possibility if Brody isn't the one to receive it, then he will also take away Brody's youngest Oscar winner record, despite how close their ages are.

The previous holder of the record was Richard Dreyfuss for The Goodbye Girl in 1978, when he was 30 years old, who held the record for 25 years until it was broken in 2003. If Brody loses the award to Chalamet, he will have held it for 22 years, making him the third-longest holder of the record, behind Dreyfuss and Marlon Brando for On the Waterfront when he was almost 31. However, if Brody manages to win at the Oscars, he will likely hold onto the record for plenty more years to come.