His family moved to Appleton, Wis., from Budapest, Hungary, when he was a toddler, his father securing work as a rabbi. “He had the most relentless personality and he overcame tremendous failure as well and hardship,” the 41-year-old actor said from Los Angeles.īorn Ehrich Weiss in 1874, he took the name Harry Houdini as a tribute to the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. “All the physical aspects were much more painful and challenging than I had anticipated, and that’s only just a fragment of what he was going through.”īrody - known for his Oscar-winning role in The Pianist - had to be in top physical form to shoot the miniseries, but he credits both Houdini’s physical and mental capabilities for what he was able to accomplish as a performer. “The amount of chains and locks in which he had to be enshrouded with leaves you bruised and aching,” he said. Practising breathing underwater, hanging from cranes and being shackled in chains in preparation to play the illusionist shed light on the “sheer pain” Houdini endured, said Brody.

This was just one of the ways the legendary escape artist kept his audience spellbound, along with wrangling himself out of a straitjacket while attached to a pole hanging upside down off a building, breaking out of a prison cell and picking a lock to release himself from a bank safe. So turning around even to figure out how to get out, it’s very disorienting,” he said of his first day on the set of the miniseries Houdini, which airs Monday and Tuesday at 9 p.m. “You’re in this confined space with additional pressure because it’s a very narrow chamber and you’re submerged upside down and bolted in. When Adrien Brody was faced with recreating one of Houdini’s most ambitious stunts - freeing himself from a water torture chamber - the actor found there wasn’t much room for error.

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