Adrien Brody’s face does a lot of the heavy lifting in The Brutalist. That sounds like a lazy compliment, but it really is the first thing you notice. His László Tóth looks like a man who has learned how to keep entire disasters behind his eyes while still measuring a room for its proportions.

Brady Corbet’s film has the kind of cast that makes every dinner, train station, worksite, and wealthy living room feel charged. Nobody is just standing around supplying exposition. They all seem to represent some force pressing on László’s life. Family. Money. grief. American polish. Old wounds in nice clothes.

The film follows László, a Hungarian Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor. He arrives in postwar America and tries to rebuild his career, his marriage, and some version of himself. The story is huge, but the performances keep dragging it back to human scale. A glance across a table can feel as heavy as a concrete wall.

Here is the main cast of The Brutalist and who everyone plays.

Adrien Brody as László Tóth

Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, the film’s central architect and bruised soul. László arrives in America with talent, trauma, pride, and a body that often looks like it is barely cooperating with him. He wants work and his wife back. He wants his vision to survive a world that keeps treating him like a useful inconvenience.

Brody makes László magnetic without making him easy. There is a sharpness to him, a kind of brittle dignity that can turn into arrogance before anyone has time to duck. He can be warm, cruel, inspired, needy, and impossible in the span of one scene.

That complexity matters. The Brutalist has little interest in making László a clean symbol of suffering. He is a survivor and a man who sometimes uses his pain like a locked door. Brody lets all of that sit in the performance without smoothing it out.

His best scenes have a frightening stillness. László looks at buildings as if they are the only things that might understand him.

Felicity Jones as Erzsébet Tóth

Felicity Jones plays Erzsébet Tóth, László’s wife, whose arrival changes the temperature of the film. Before she appears in full, she exists almost like an ache in László’s life. Once she enters, the movie gains a voice that can challenge his myth of solitary genius.

Erzsébet has survived her own horrors, and Jones gives her a stern, wounded intelligence. She is loving, but she is also tired of being turned into part of László’s tragic architecture. There is a wonderful steeliness in the way she speaks to him. It’s as if affection and fury have learned to share the same chair.

Her role is crucial because she keeps the film from floating away into masculine obsession. László’s work matters, yes. His pain matters. Erzsébet reminds us that other people have been carrying history too.

Guy Pearce as Harrison Lee Van Buren

Guy Pearce plays Harrison Lee Van Buren, the wealthy industrialist who becomes László’s patron. He is charming, cultured, grand, and absolutely poisonous once you understand the shape of his power.

Harrison is one of those men who makes generosity feel like a trap. He admires László’s talent, but his admiration has ownership baked into it. He wants to fund genius, display it, direct it, and bask in the reflected glory. Pearce gives him beautiful manners with something rotten underneath.

The performance is so effective because Harrison believes his own refinement. He does not need to stomp around like a villain, he can ruin lives from a dinner table. He can make a commission sound like salvation while quietly tightening the leash.

Pearce makes him fascinating in the ugliest way. You understand why people would accept his invitations. You also start wanting everyone to leave the room.

Joe Alwyn as Harry Lee Van Buren

Joe Alwyn plays Harry Lee Van Buren, Harrison’s son. Harry brings a younger, slicker kind of entitlement into the story. He has inherited wealth, access, and the confidence of someone who has rarely had to wonder whether a room will open for him.

Alwyn gives Harry a chilly social ease. He can seem pleasant enough at first glance, but there is something pinched and superior in him. He watches László and the people around him with the faint impatience of a man waiting for the help to remember its place.

Harry matters because he shows that Harrison’s world will continue beyond Harrison. The money, the casual cruelty, the class assumptions, the little humiliations. They all have heirs.

The character may not dominate the movie the way Harrison does, but he adds another layer to its portrait of American power. Same mansion, younger face.

Raffey Cassidy as Zsófia

Raffey Cassidy plays Zsófia, László’s niece, who arrives in America carrying trauma that has changed the way she moves through the world. She is quiet in a way that makes everyone around her seem louder than they realize.

Cassidy gives Zsófia a haunted watchfulness. Her silence has weight. She often seems to be absorbing the room rather than participating in it, and that makes her presence strangely powerful. In a movie filled with men making declarations about art and destiny, Zsófia’s stillness feels like its own testimony.

She also gives the family story a generational charge. László and Erzsébet are not the only ones trying to survive what happened in Europe. Zsófia carries the future, and the future arrives damaged.

Ariane Labed as older Zsófia

Ariane Labed plays the older Zsófia, who appears in the film’s later stretch. Her role reframes much of what came before, because she becomes the person who speaks about László’s life and work from a distance.

Labed brings a calm authority to the older Zsófia. She has the poise of someone who has learned how to turn family history into public language. That is moving, but also a little eerie. By the time she is speaking, László has become an artist to be interpreted.

That final shift is one of the film’s sharpest choices. The quiet girl becomes the keeper of the story. She explains the work, but the explanation also reminds us that legacy often belongs to whoever is left standing at the microphone.

Stacy Martin as Maggie Lee

Stacy Martin plays Maggie Lee, part of the Van Buren orbit. She belongs to the film’s world of polished rooms, moneyed rituals, and social performances that look graceful until you notice the power running underneath them.

Martin has a way of making elegance feel slightly distant, which suits the film. Maggie exists inside a class structure that knows how to absorb discomfort without letting it disturb the furniture. Around László, that kind of poise can feel almost alien.

Her character helps fill out the Van Buren household as more than one rich man and his money. It is a whole environment with its own codes, smiles, loyalties, and silences. Everyone in that world understands status. Some understand it so well that they barely need to speak.

Emma Laird as Audrey

Emma Laird plays Audrey, another figure connected to the Van Buren family’s social world. Like Maggie, Audrey helps show how wealth operates through atmosphere as much as direct action.

Laird gives Audrey a presence that fits the film’s fascination with observation. People watch each other constantly in The Brutalist. They measure reactions, status, taste, usefulness. Audrey belongs to that field of glances.

The role adds texture to the privileged spaces László enters. These are not just rooms full of money. They are rooms full of people trained to understand who belongs and who has been temporarily allowed in.

Isaach de Bankolé as Gordon

Isaach de Bankolé plays Gordon, one of the figures who crosses paths with László during his American life. De Bankolé has the kind of screen presence that can make even a supporting role feel lived-in, and he brings a grounded quality to a film that can often feel monumental.

Gordon helps widen the world around László. The movie is so focused on architecture, patronage, and family that these outside connections matter. They remind us that László’s story is also an immigrant story, a labor story, and a story about people trying to survive inside systems built by someone else.

De Bankolé gives the film a different rhythm when he appears. Less marble, more pavement.

Alessandro Nivola as Attila

Alessandro Nivola plays Attila, László’s cousin, who helps him after he reaches America. Attila is an important early figure because he represents one possible version of assimilation. He has built a life, a business, and a place for himself, but that place comes with compromises.

Nivola plays him with warmth and strain. Attila wants to help László, but he also wants stability. He knows the cost of seeming too foreign, too difficult, too attached to the past. His relationship with László carries affection, embarrassment, resentment, and fear.

That makes him one of the film’s more quietly painful characters. Attila is not cruel in the grand Harrison Van Buren sense. He is a man trying to survive by becoming acceptable, and László’s presence threatens the fragile order he has made.

The Ensemble Makes the Movie Feel Carved From Pressure

The cast of The Brutalist works because every major character seems to press on László from a different side. Erzsébet pulls him back toward family and truth. Harrison pulls him toward money and legacy. Harry shows the inheritance of power. Zsófia carries the future. Attila shows the compromises of survival.

Brody sits at the center, but the movie never lets László exist alone. That is the point. Genius may look solitary from a distance, but this film keeps showing the network of people, wounds, patrons, spouses, relatives, and witnesses around it.

The performances give The Brutalist its human weather. Without them, the film could have become a handsome slab of Big Important Cinema. With them, it feels alive, difficult, and sometimes painfully intimate.

Everyone is building something here. A career. A marriage. A family story. A reputation. A monument. The cast makes you feel the cost of every brick.