Adam Brody

Watch what Adam Brody does when someone else is talking. In Nobody Wants This (2024), Kristen Bell's Joanne comes at her rabbi with a joke, a challenge and a change of subject in the same breath, and Brody's Noah simply takes it in. He does not wait for his turn. He looks pleased to be there, and the pleasure looks unplanned. We smiled watching the two of them talk, and it was the listening that did it: the courtship works because Noah so plainly enjoys her company, and the series never has to tell us the romance matters.

That quality has been there since The O.C. (2003–2007), where Seth Cohen was the boy in the corner with the pop-culture references and the fast, nervous mouth. Brody was the awkward one who was also the funny one, and for a few years that was a new kind of leading boy on television. The decade after was supporting parts in other people's films: Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), Thank You for Smoking (2005), Jennifer's Body (2009), Scream 4 (2011). In Scream 4 he is Deputy Hoss, one of three deputies whose scenes in patrol cars, as we said at the time, go nowhere at all. That was Wes Craven's staging rather than Brody's fault, but it is the shape of those years: cast for his ease, then given nothing to be easy about.

The later parts are better chosen. Ready or Not (2019), Promising Young Woman (2020) and Fleishman Is in Trouble (2022) each take the nice guy and either extend him or turn him slightly, and Brody is good at letting us wonder which is happening. The two DC superhero films (2019, 2023) in which he plays the grown-up Freddy use him as the adult version of a teenage hero; in the sequel the whole cast is buried under a grey computer finale, and we did not single him out because the film did not either.

He is not a transformer, and he does not pretend to be. He has said of the rabbi in Nobody Wants This, "I'm an actor and that's the part that I'm not," and he has talked about his own talent as having a realistic ceiling. Both are honest, and both point to the limit: he is always recognisably himself, and the parts that suit him are the ones that need exactly that. Bell is the collaborator who has got the most from him, because she puts an edge on every line and he receives it without flinching, which is a rarer skill than it sounds.

Start with Nobody Wants This, which is his case made at length. The open question is whether anyone will write him a part in which being liked is not enough to get him through the scene. We suspect he could play it. We are less sure anyone will ask.