The Secret To Adam Brody’s Continued Success? He Never Treated Seth Cohen As Someone To Distance Himself From

Acting is not exactly recognized as the most modest profession. Sure, the best can at least parry a sycophantic compliment at the risk of seeming too vain, but it’s rare to see anyone in the public eye offer a truly self-effacing evaluation as Adam Brody gave of himself in 2013. “I don’t think I’ll ever be the actor I want to be or admire because I’m not eccentric,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I know I have a couple great roles in me, but realistically speaking, there’s a ceiling to my talent — and I don’t mind.”

In the dozen years since, Brody may have found that ceiling for recognition by his peers higher than he imagined. His role as “hot rabbi” Noah Roklov in Nobody Wants This, the second season of which has been sitting atop the Netflix Top 10 since its release in late October, earned him Best Actor nominations at the Emmys and Golden Globes — as well as a win at the Critics’ Choice Awards. Further, the outpouring of online swooning for Noah’s affectionate attentiveness has reaffirmed his chokehold on the imagination of a generation of fans.

Even still, try to find any appraisals of the performance that do not make at least some passing mention of Brody’s breakout role as Seth Cohen in The O.C. His culture-shifting cool geek has become the default filter through which all analysis of Brody must pass, a habit that even extends to his Nobody Wants This show-runner. “It felt really exciting to show him as this adult version of Seth Cohen,” Erin Foster told The New York Times last year. (Brody, for the record, downplayed the direct parallel to GQ.)

Like many star-making turns, success can be a Faustian bargain. Celebrities who build their profile on television have an especially tall order to emerge from the shadow of their most recognizable characters. Viewers develop a different kind of familiarity with figures whom they invite into their homes each week. They’re the friends you have over for a casual dinner party, unlike those big screen icons who feel more like arm candy for a fancy black-tie gala.

Unlike many performers who gained notoriety in teen fare, Brody never treated Seth Cohen as someone to distance himself from. (Hear that, Jacob Elordi?) His contemporaries, such as Chris Pratt and John Krasinski, underwent massive and very public body transformations to reinvent themselves as sex symbols suitable for the silver screen. Yet just because an actor hasn’t dramatically altered their physical appearance to play a role does not make them any less gifted at embodying a role. Adam Brody is far more than just a sentient button-down worn over a ringer tee, which is how even the most positive chatter about Nobody Wants This can make his performance sound.

The career Adam Brody built for himself between his two television smashes attests to just that. His most notable splashes have come in bit parts that leverage widely traded pieces of his persona: seeming like a “good guy” in Promising Young Woman, being “down” in American Fiction. But these are merely the tip of the iceberg of a career full of unheralded development and underappreciated risks.

No one deserves more credit for seeing the vision of what else Brody could do than Whit Stillman, who first cast him in 2012’s Damsels in Distress. He shares many scenes of this droll campus comedy opposite Greta Gerwig in top screwball heroine form, and Brody counters her energy with a debonair but down-to-earth charisma that recalls Cary Grant in a wirier build. The silver-tongued actor proves an ideal vessel for Stillman’s elevated dialogue, capturing the amusing affectation while grounding it in a smoldering sense of reality.

Stillman became so enamored with Brody’s talents that he cast the actor in a TV pilot, 2014’s The Cosmopolitans, that stretched his talents even further. Brody’s still playing a romantic lead, but he operates in a more reserved fashion. Stillman helps the actor strike a balance of withholding a little something from the audience without compromising his authentic impulse to wear his heart on his sleeve. While Brody is far too wired to pull off the strong, silent type, the show teased the potential of true dynamic range.

That episode, produced in the early days of Prime Video when Amazon turned pilot season into a voting competition, is now sadly unavailable to watch. A common theme running through Brody’s body of work is that some of his most daring or different projects always tend to fall through the cracks during massive changes in the industry. Early experimentations with VOD, the streaming boom, COVID shuttering cinemas, the peak TV bubble bursting, the theatrical market’s contraction … you name it, there’s some interesting Adam Brody work awaiting discovery.

One such example is 2013’s (also unavailable to stream) Some Girl(s), a day-and-date VOD release built around the concept of seeing just how many women Brody can have sexual chemistry with. This modest drama, adapted from a Neil LaBute play, places his unnamed protagonist in rooms with various exes as he tries to gain closure on past relationships. These interactions make him own some of the insidiousness of his past actions, but they also cut to the core of Brody’s appeal. In a more adult role, the motor-mouth begins to slow down and leave space for contemplation. There’s a tension that is hard to establish in verbose characters like Seth who speak their mind and leave little space for reflection.

Brody may never be able to shed his lineage as a direct but distant descendant of the Woody Allen style of nebbish, neurotic Jewish men. But at least he’s from the branch of the family tree that learned how to listen to women rather than just lasso them into bed. He’s a great reactor in an age where women are more often leading the charge – and, to steal a phrase from Noah, he can handle them.

A look at any grown-up Brody role almost always carries a story stemming from the actor’s playing with the patience of his pacing. Season 2 of Nobody Wants This demonstrates how he’s gotten a handle on the impetuousness of his youthful penchant toward expressing the unfiltered emotional experience of his characters. Brody delivers dialogue less like it’s a race to get the line out, as it often felt watching Seth, instead showing how Noah deliberately parses his words to convey the complexity of his thoughts.

That sense to sit in a moment, rather than undercut it with a punchline, is a skill he honed across projects of many flavors. It’s visible in something as against-type as his villainous turn in The River Wild, a remake that ended up going straight to Netflix in 2023. As Trevor, a face-tatted ex-convict, he’ll let a remark hang in the air and leave it suspended there to enhance a sense of malice. Yet even under a toughened visage, there’s still some familiar element of Brody’s magnetism as Jimmy confronts the limits of how far he can glide on his considerable charms.

Even when not overtly subverting his nice-guy persona, Brody can masterfully add shading to it. While he plays another character named Seth in the 2022 Hulu miniseries Fleishman Is in Trouble, this one is imbued with a different blend of defining emotions. Brody’s rarely been better than he is as the weary, albeit undeniably sturdy, best friend to Jesse Eisenberg’s titular divorcee. He’s mastered the art of being a present scene partner, giving a scene more than he takes from it. Just as in Nobody Wants This, Brody’s often best deployed in a cutaway to let his reaction resonate.

But the apex of the mid-career Brody experience is The Kid Detective, a film important enough to him that he spent nearly a decade trying to get it made in a producorial capacity. Sony gave the film a small release, albeit in theaters during the height of the pandemic, and it’s the kind of future cult classic that’s still ripe for rediscovery.

As a washed-up former childhood gumshoe, Brody’s titular investigator has all the sadsack nature of an Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye with none of the rizz. His Abe Applebaum remains haunted by the case of a disappearing friend from his teenage years, and the stench of its unsolved status lingers well into his thirties. It teeters on the verge of parodying the mystery genre, but remains earnestly rooted in a palpable sense of dramatic longing and loss.

Abe Applebaum could easily be the shadow self of Adam Brody. An actor more bothered by the inability to detach from an early definitional experience might well end up like this laconic character, who displays such a naked desperation to prove he can be more than the portrait drawn in his own youth. By not forcing Brody to rattle off zinger after zinger, writer/director Evan Morgan gives Brody space to sit in his vulnerability. That space allows each line the ability to land and deliver a startlingly earnest examination of what it means for Abe’s adolescent identity to become inescapable.

Five years have passed since The Kid Detective hit theaters, though it remains too widely underseen to discuss its ending in detail. Know this: the film ends with the camera pushing in on Abe, sitting by himself on a couch, and beginning to weep. (He’s not just getting misty-eyed; it’s a full-bodied cry.) It’s an unfortunate encapsulation of a truism that has come to define Brody’s entire career. Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Cry, and you cry alone.

But just because that’s the way things have been for Adam Brody’s career doesn’t mean that’s the way they must continue. There’s a variety and virtuosity beyond the Seth Cohen archetype deserving of recognition alongside the most obvious Brody star texts. He can play roles and variations of himself. We can handle him.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, The Playlist and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.