Adrien Brody has claimed that after finishing The Pianist, he got “seriously depressed”

Brody garnered a Best Actor Academy Award for his performance as a Jewish Polish man attempting to flee the Holocaust, but he acknowledges the grim endeavor left him with emotional troubles.

“It was all-consuming,” he tells Britain’s The Guardian. “For a good year after, I was probably seriously depressed.”

“There were severe transitions that I put myself through physically and emotionally… I shot it when I was 27, and that was my real awakening and entrance into adulthood, that responsibility, and awareness of my own good fortune that I had taken for granted.”

In addition, the actor expressed sadness that further parts of that caliber had not come his way (or anybody else’s) in the decade after “The Pianist” was released.

“The key is to somehow get yourself to a place where it feels as real as it can feel, and you can’t repeat that…,” he said, adding that the aftermath of filming The Pianist helped him decide to branch out into less taxing Hollywood blockbusters like Predators and King Kong.

“But it’s so precarious, that place, it’s so hard to find, and it takes all that work to get to it, and then it’s not something you just turn on and repeat, and so, yes, I like things that are very different for me and cause me to have to stretch.

“[King Kong] was pretty fun! It was harder than I anticipated. I wanted to do it because I thought it would be fun, and kind of a departure from all the weighty things that I’m attracted to.”