Age: 53
male
Adrien Nicholas Brody (born April 14, 1973) is an American actor. He is known for his portrayal of Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski's war drama The Pianist (2002), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor at age 29, becoming the youngest actor to win in that category. He also became the second American male actor to win the César Award for Best Actor for the same film. For his role as a Holocaust survivor who immigrates to the United States in The Brutalist (2024), he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor and earned his second Academy Award Nomination and subsequent win for Best Actor. Brody has also starred in The Thin Red Line(1998), The Village (2004), King Kong (2005), Hollywoodland (2006), Cadillac Records (2008), Predators (2010), and See How They Run(2022). He has frequently collaborated with filmmaker Wes Anderson, appearing in his films The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Fantastic Mr. Fox(2009), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), The French Dispatch (2021), and Asteroid City(2023). He portrayed Salvador Dalí in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011) and Arthur Miller in Andrew Dominik's Blonde (2022). On television, he has played Luca Changretta in the fourth season of the BBC series Peaky Blinders (2017) and Pat Riley in the HBO sports drama series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022–2023). He earned Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his roles as Harry Houdini in the History Channel miniseries Houdini (2014), and investor Josh Aaronson in the HBO series Succession (2021).
The story begins with our protagonist waking up inside a nautiloid, a dimension-crossing illithid flying ship. They are implanted with an illithid tadpole, parasites that enthral and transform people into creatures known as mind flayers; however, before the transformation is complete, the ship comes under attack from githyanki warriors and their red dragons. The protagonist is freed during the fighting and steers the damaged ship back to Faerûn, where it crashes. As the protagonist searches for a way to remove their parasite, they encounter other survivors of the wreck, all likewise implanted with tadpoles: the githyanki fighter Lae'zel, the Sharran cleric Shadowheart, the high elf vampire Astarion, the human wizard Gale, the human warlock Wyll, and the tiefling barbarian Karlach. Meanwhile a deadly cult which follows a mysterious entity called the Absoulte has started to gain traction and spread across Faerûn, and coincidentally seems to be the source of the recent rise in tadpole infections.
