Adrien Brody's performance in The Brutalist is so singular that it's almost impossible to tell which actors he takes inspiration from. So why not ask the man himself? On this week’s bonus episode of Table for Two, the Academy Award-winner (and nominee for this year’s Best Actor Oscar) joins host Bruce Bozzi to discuss his first big purchase upon making it in Hollywood, his favorite band, and his go-to cocktail.

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Adrien Brody readily admits that the New York City he grew up in was rough around the edges. A native of Jackson Heights, Queens, he says the years he spent there in the '70s and '80s toughened him, but also made him empathetic—in other words, it gave him the ammunition he needed to become an actor. It wasn’t long into Brody's career that minor successes became major ones. Early roles in Restaurant and Summer of Sam in the late 1990s led to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist in 2002, a part that made the 29-year old the youngest to ever win the Academy Award for Best Actor. And while Brody’s career hasn’t slowed in the intervening decades, his latest performance, in The Brutalist, has drawn the same type of rare, unanimous acclaim that his breakthrough in The Pianist did. On this episode of Table for Two, Brody joins host Bruce Bozzi to discuss what drew him to the performing arts, the mental toll of method acting, and his perspective on this year’s Oscars, which take place March 2nd.

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Damian Woetzel’s rise to the top of the ballet world seems straightforward. From his childhood in Boston he demonstrated an aptitude for ballet; by his late teens, he was touring nationally as part of the Los Angeles Ballet; and in the mid-1980s, at 18, he eschewed college to pursue a career as a dancer in New York City. Over the following two decades, Woetzel climbed the New York City Ballet’s ranks, first becoming a principal dancer, then a household name. In his mid-30s, with the prospect of retirement looming, Woetzel decided to head up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he graduated from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2007 with an M.P.A., a distinction that, a decade later, led to him becoming The Juilliard School’s seventh president. On this episode of Table for Two, Woetzel joins host Bruce Bozzi for lunch at IRIS in New York City, where they discuss his early years in New York, former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Gifford’s role in motivating him to return to school, and his plan for leading an arts conservatory into the modern age.

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