'The Pianist' actor Adrien Brody is not interested in culture wars. "It's fascinating", he admits, "But it's really tragic", reports 'Variety'.
"We see how fractured our world is. Look around -- it's not hard to see," said the Oscar-winning actor from his home in New York.
Brody had to dive into these dark corners when preparing for 'Manodrome', in which he plays a masculinity cult leader, and was quick to dive right out.
"I tried to put this stuff down," he admitted.
As per 'Variety', his character 'Dad Dan' isn't the super-serious, nefarious figurehead one summons when envisioning a libertarian masculinity cult. Rather, he is a friendly, hoodie-wearing man of leisure who opens his house to all who need sanctuary. Sanctuary, that is, from the evil, entrapping ways of women and modern society.
"It was important for me to not be a superficially manipulative villain," the 49-year-old star tells Variety of the part.
"I feel like there's a lot of complexity here. There's a sense of fatherhood."
'Manodrome', which premieres in competition in Berlin on Saturday, follows Ralphie, a gym-obsessed Uber driver who has recently lost his job and is expecting his first baby with girlfriend Sal (Odessa Young).
When a friend offers him a lifeline in the form of a group of men who like to help out down-on-their-luck guys, Ralphie takes it. But he soon discovers that his new friends have some pretty specific proclivities, and have all but banished women from their lives.
"I wanted (Dan) to be, on the surface, a very relatable kind of guy," explained Brody.
"I think there are a lot of ways in which he feels he's doing a very positive thing. There's an underlying sinister quality about his own fascination with Ralphie and watching the simultaneous demise and (Ralphie's) own identification with his power within, which is something (Dan is) cultivating in all of these men," the actor added.
