‘I could not get through the script without crying’: Adrien Brody talks to the death row survivor who he’s playing on the London stage

The rehearsal space for the Donmar Warehouse theatre is a scruffy, gymnasium-scale, subterranean cavern in Covent Garden. Strewn around, on Monday morning last week, are some telltale signs of stressful, long days: scrunched-up packs of bourbon biscuits and custard creams, and scattered pages of heavily inked script; also, intriguingly, four (empty) boxes of heavy-duty handcuffs. Dominating the room is a makeshift stage that looks like a boxing ring without ropes and measures 3.5 metres by 3.2 metres, almost the exact dimensions of a cell on death row.

Nick Yarris, a power-bald man of 63 with high cheekbones and a scar on his chin, stands in one corner and starts pacing diagonally. “One… two… three… ” he says, counting his steps, his work boots making a resonant clunk as he walks. “Jay Smith used to be in the cell above me. And he was a very famous case too, the Susan Reinert murder and all this shit. But he would pace all day and he walked seven steps one way… ”

Yarris has reached the other corner now and spins around. “But he only walked fucking six steps back!” he exclaims. “Seven there and six back. And I’d be listening in my cell and it used to drive me mad, right? I said, ‘Hey man, I got to try this out.’ So I’m in my cell… ”

Adrien Brody, the 51-year-old Oscar-winning star of The Pianist, sits cross-legged in the corner, looking on. “One leg is shorter than the other probably,” he suggests.

“Or he was going around his bed,” counters Yarris. “But no, I tried that one. Maybe he was doing it deliberately: ‘Oh, he’s doing it deliberately… ’”

Brody springs to his feet; he has a lithe, athlete’s build and a flop of dark hair. He wants to try it out himself. “Here we go,” he says, “five.”

Yarris shakes his head, still befuddled by a 40-year-old memory. “See the insanity of death row?”

He had a lot of time to mull over such incongruities. In 1981, when he was 20, Yarris was picked up by the police in Pennsylvania in a stolen car while high on drugs. He became involved in a scuffle with the policeman, the officer’s gun went off into the air and Yarris landed in jail, facing a lengthy prison sentence. While locked up, he read about the recent case of Linda Mae Craig, who had been raped and murdered about 20 miles from where he lived. Yarris decided – his head addled by methamphetamine use, he acknowledges – to try to reduce the punishment for his misdemeanour by saying he knew who had killed Craig: a local hoodlum who Yarris heard had recently died. The problem was that the man he pinned it on wasn’t dead and was now a law-abiding citizen with an alibi. Yarris became the prime suspect in the Craig case.

In July 1982, Yarris was found guilty of murdering Craig and sentenced to death. He would spend 22 years on death row, mostly in Pennsylvania but also, after he escaped and went on the run for a month, in Florida (where he shared a facility with serial killer Ted Bundy). It was two decades in which Yarris was stabbed, regularly beaten and watched men die in front of his eyes. It got so bad that, even though he was assured of his own innocence, he wrote to the state governor pleading for his right to execution. Ultimately, though, new DNA testing was developed and Yarris became the first death row prisoner to use it. In January 2004, he walked free.

Yarris’s story has been told in a memoir, an excellent 2015 documentary called The Fear of 13 and now a play of the same name, written by Lindsey Ferrentino and starring Brody as Yarris, which has just opened at the Donmar. (The title comes from a self-taught obsession with language and words that Yarris picked up in prison: “triskaidekaphobia” being one of his favourites.) Part of the reason that his tale holds up to retelling is that it is a classic one: it’s crime and punishment; a catastrophic injustice that is righted just in the nick of time; a damning indictment of the criminal justice system.

But the main draw of the Nick Yarris story is Yarris himself: a captivating, labyrinthine storyteller with a sharp eye for the absurd. As he stands on the rehearsal room stage, in a theatrical recreation of his home for 22 years, it’s hard not to think the experience would be triggering. But Yarris insists not. “Through a series of meticulous, polite behaviours, you can actually erase all of the pathogens back to the trauma,” he says. “I’ve gotten so good at it. Death row is like this memory of a movie I’ve watched a long time ago a lot, and I know all the parts of the film, but none of it bothers me.”

These days, Yarris has chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disorder thought to be caused by repeated blows to the head. It mixes uneasily with his aphasia, which can impair the way he communicates, and which dates back to a traumatic incident in his childhood. “Nabokov’s message is true: our life can really be an artful thing if we’re the projectionist and not the screen upon which someone else projects us,” says Yarris. “I know I’m not supposed to be here. I’ve been shot, strangled, I hung myself on death row. I’ve been beaten and stabbed multiple times. I flipped a car over in 2022 in a wreck that I should have never walked away from. And I had to have brain scans for the next two years, telling me that right now I got a plaque buildup on my brain threatening to just eviscerate me at any moment.”

Yarris turns to address Brody directly, the emotion obvious. “We just had a moment in the other room,” he says. “I walked up to one of the most beautiful men I know and I looked him in the face, and I thanked him for taking away every fucking punch, kick, everything they did to me. I looked him in the eyes with honesty, and I said, ‘I can let go now.’ You see, my biggest fear wasn’t surviving death row. It was that I would die before I could tell my story. Most people who suffered deep trauma, that’s their biggest fear: no one will hear me. No one will ever understand this pain or know what it was that I became.

“I am being given a once-in-a-lifetime gift,” Yarris goes on, looking into Brody’s eyes, “and although it’s humbling to be eulogised in front of yourself, I fucking earned it.”

Brody interjects tenderly, “That’s right.”

Yarris repeats, “I fucking earned it.”

The idea for the play came to Ferrentino during the Covid pandemic. The American playwright, best known for Ugly Lies the Bone, which was a hit in New York and at the National Theatre in London in 2017, watched the documentary of The Fear of 13 and was compelled by Yarris’s voice and his extraordinary lack of bitterness and self-pity. “It was during lockdown, and I was craving theatre, and it felt like theatre to me: just a man in a chair telling his life story,” she recalls. “I did think I could, naively, get the rights to that, whack it on stage and call it a day and have a new play.”

Beyond that, though, there was the drama of Yarris’s extreme sliding-doors moment: why oh why, you want to scream, did he claim to know the killer? This sensation is made more profound when you learn that he was fully exonerated of the original crime that he was jailed for and would have walked free aged 21. “In the writing of it, the big theme that kept coming out was that every person is a few decisions away from having a completely different life,” says Ferrentino. “Everyone lives on a precipice of having their fate or their life choices be completely different. And Nick’s story is, I think, a big example of that.”

The play, The Fear of 13, became then not a monologue, but a more complex redemption narrative told through the relationship between Yarris and his girlfriend Jackie Schaffer, who met him in prison when she volunteered for a charity campaigning to abolish the death penalty. An ensemble cast fill out the assorted judges, drug dealers and fellow inmates that steered his life in different ways.

Ferrentino was in discussion with Brody about another project when she suggested he might like to play Yarris. It was a long shot: Brody started performing in theatre productions in New York aged 12, but hadn’t acted on stage for more than 30 years. Besides, their accents are different – Brody is from Queens; Yarris has a strong Philadelphia twang – and they don’t much look alike, either. But Ferrentino never saw the character as an impersonation.

“First of all, it should be said that I think Adrien Brody is a once-in-a-generation talent,” she says. “He’s open-hearted, deeply intelligent, very sensitive, very intellectual, but also very street smart, cunning, clever, witty. You can believe he would rob you, but you can also believe he would read Tolstoy. And Adrien is the only person I can think of that can do all those things, that can play an ex-con and can play a concert pianist.

“And that’s what Nick is. He has the soul of a poet, but a criminal history and is a brilliant, sensitive, open-hearted romantic and has had really hard circumstances, and used to be in prison fights, but also used to go back to his cell and read great literature and fall in love. It’s a cliche about containing multitudes, but that’s the most succinct way of saying it: both Nick and Adrien Brody contain the same multitudes.”

Brody signed on for The Fear of 13 in a week. Why?

“I’ve been open to doing theatre for some time, but I’ve been waiting to find something that touched me and this came out of the blue,” he says. “Lindsey and I were discussing something else, but she proposed this, and I was so moved by it. The first 10, 15 times I read the script, I could not get through it without crying.”

Another motivation was the deeper societal resonance of the story for Brody. “The system is broken… Hey Nick, did you read about that poor Japanese man who just served 50-some-odd years?” he says over his shoulder to Yarris, referring to Iwao Hakamada, who was convicted of four murders in 1966 but finally acquitted and released last month. “He’s 88 or something, let out of prison. And they most likely planted evidence and tortured him into a confession. How could anyone grasp that? It’s impossible.”

“It’s worse than dying,” adds Yarris. “I asked to die rather than linger.”

In preparation for the play, Brody and the rest of the cast visited Belmarsh, a high-security prison in south-east London. “And if everybody wasn’t staring at me, I could have just wept, because of how soul-robbing it is,” says Brody. “You’re surrounded by all these people who have no opportunity and are all needing love and appreciation and have made some dumb mistake in their life and are being punished for that.” He turns to Yarris: “You’re miraculous, that’s what I’m trying to get at.”

Brody, who is being paid the standard Donmar wage for his performance, has so far enjoyed the experience – for the most part. When he first arrived in London, he lived in the flat above the rehearsal room: it was a short commute but the whole experience was perhaps too intense. “It was like a Spike Jonze movie,” he smiles, referencing the director of Being John Malkovich. “I do mostly independent films and it’s far from what people imagine the experience of a quote-unquote Hollywood actor. It’s just not anything to do with the perception of what it is. But theatre is even more!” He laughs.

“Theatre, you’re living in the attic and you’re working in the basement, and you don’t leave and nobody brings you lunch. You go out and you’ll get a sandwich at Tesco, and you munch it down and try to absorb all this material and try to represent so much. And you’re with 10 other people doing the same and it is quite wonderful. I found it to be very gratifying – somewhat frightening, but gratifying – to face that.”

With the production moving into the theatre, and Brody leaving the attic, there’s no hiding from the fact that this is really happening now. This is especially unavoidable at the Donmar Warehouse, which packs 251 audience members into a venue where no seat is more than four rows from the stage. Its fame has spread far and wide, especially under Sam Mendes in the 1990s and Michael Grandage in the 2000s, with still-talked-about performances from Nicole Kidman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and Ewan McGregor.

“Nicole Kidman was naked in it!” says Brody. “Adrien Brody was nearly naked in it! It did feel like hallowed ground when I first stepped in. But once it’s live, it’s sink or swim. And I don’t like to sink, so I better start swimming.”

Even before The Fear of 13 opened it was a smash: tickets for all performances for its two-month run sold out almost instantly. I point out, half-seriously, to Brody that he didn’t really need to do this interview, because the Donmar couldn’t sell any more seats. But he turns momentarily serious. “We did need to do this,” he replies. “We don’t need the publicity. But we need to honour what this is and also to respectfully portray something like this that is really important to be on people’s radars.”

The clamour for tickets would not have been harmed by reviews coming from last month’s Venice film festival that suggest Brody is now a weighty favourite for a second Academy Award. The film is The Brutalist, a mesmerising, blind-siding epic from Brady Corbet, a child actor turned director, that runs at three-and-a-half hours with a 15-minute intermission and was made for just $10m. Brody plays László Tóth, a fictional Jewish-Hungarian architect of the Bauhaus school who emigrates to the United States after the second world war and stutteringly tries to rebuild his life and career. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian described Brody’s turn as “a career best for him, surely, and an advance on his performance in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist”.

Brody does not shrug off the praise: it clearly means a lot to him. Around a decade ago, he admitted that he found himself sometimes disillusioned with the scope of the work he was being offered and his lack of control over the process. He turned to painting as a creative outlet. But over time, he has rekindled his love for acting: starting with roles in the superior television series Peaky Blinders, Succession and Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, and his fruitful, ongoing collaboration with Wes Anderson, and now with The Fear of 13 and The Brutalist.

“The Brutalist has given me… I think I’d been yearning for a role of that calibre, and a director of that calibre to honour the character,” says Brody. “It’s not simply in an actor’s hands. And Brady did just that. It’s not like I haven’t been working towards that. You have to continue. And I’ve worked with wonderful people. I’m not diminishing the work. It’s just, The Pianist was a triumph, and it was a real achievement. And this had far fewer means, and is a very different journey. It’s a remarkable thing.”

Yarris listens in intently, and they fall into a good-natured spat about how bullish Brody should be about the Oscars. Yarris particularly liked his performance as Luca Changretta, the Italian-American mobster who shows up halfway through Peaky Blinders. “Do me a favour,” Yarris chides the actor. “You’re fucking Adrien Brody. Own it! When you walk in there to collect your hardware, the head is up, the chin is up, and I want you to fucking own it!”

Brody mutters: “If that day comes… ”

“‘If’ is a weak word,” Yarris fires back, “when my day comes again. You are Luca Changretta, what the fuck!”

“I’ve got to be more Luca Changretta,” Brody accepts.

Here, there is a parallel with Yarris: as Brody was winning his Oscar in 2003, Yarris was on the final push to overturn his conviction. The intervening years have been something of a mixed bag. He moved to the UK in 2005 and has since lived in the woods in Oregon and latterly in Los Angeles in a camper van. He’s been married, divorced; fallen in and out of love. He’s been rich, after his multimillion-dollar settlement, and not. He wants to write more books and he’s working to develop a television series called Kings of the Gallows.

“Can I tell you?” says Yarris, gazing over at Brody. “It’s so important that you know how happy I am now, Adrien. Dude, I don’t cry for any of it, so you don’t have to. Like, I love you for the feelings that you’re investing in all this. But man, I’m smashing it now. I got the most beautiful girl in the world in love with me. I’m literally walking around London the last week with smiles that are aching my face. I’m happy as shit, man. I’m being honest, it’s so sweet.”

Yarris hasn’t seen The Fear of 13 play yet: he’s realised there’s little point trying to micromanage his life any more. Whatever happens next, it can’t be stranger or harder than what he’s faced down already. “I’m getting all these beautiful rewards for doing something that a lot of us should do anyway,” he says. “I held on to my humanity, no matter what. It’s the only thing I’m proud of. In fact, I allowed death row to enhance it.”

• The Fear of 13 runs at the Donmar Warehouse until 30 November