My meeting with Adrien Brody takes place in curious circumstances at the Venice Film Festival. News of Owen Wilson’s rumoured suicide attempt (amid claims his ex, Kate Hudson, was seeing another man) has cast a doomy shadow over Wes Anderson’s movie The Darjeeling Limited ( pictured). This comedy about three goony brothers – Brody, Wilson and Jason Schwartzman – on a train journey across India is about adult siblings who spend their entire lives failing to bond. It is deeply peculiar. It looks beautiful, and its sad clown humour comes from another age.

At a press conference Anderson read out a short statement, reputedly from Wilson, saying how sorry he was for not being at the festival to support the film. There is a three-line whip forbidding any questions concerning Wilson’s mental or physical well-being, on pain of instant ejection.

But Brody looks far from troubled by the prospect of our imminent inquisition. The clothes are pure indie pop star. The hair is a romantic, dark mop with a parting left to right. The cheekbones are porcelain. The limpid green eyes are friendly and engaging.

The youngest Oscar winner for Best Actor (The Pianist, aged 29, 2002) is truly one of a kind. He is the only Alist Hollywood star I’ve met who actually enjoys talking to journalists. “I’ve been to India before for a holiday,” he says in his wonderful cello-like timbre. “Maybe it was a combination of where I was in my life and that it was too much for me, but I wasn’t able to embrace the chaos on that first trip. Returning to shoot The Darjeeling Limited was a profoundly different experience. I had the opportunity to enjoy India without the burden of having to have a good time.”

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He is the only child of liberal parents with East European roots. Father was a junior-high school-teacher. Mother is Sylvia Plachy, a photojournalist for the Village Voice. Did working with Wilson and Schwartzman on The Darjeeling Limited make Brody wish he had brothers of his own? “Yes and no,” Brody grins ruefully. “I think I’d prefer to act having brothers if they were the only choices.”

The three brothers in the film are chalk-and-cheese nightmares. Wilson is the insufferable older one who can’t stop giving orders.

He refuses to tell Brody or Schwartzman’s pint-sized loner why he has forced them on this mad magical mystery tour when they all basically despise each other. All we know is that their father has recently died, and that Wilson has used the excuse to buy train tickets for a “spiritual” trip into the heart of India.

Brody’s gift for comedy has been a well-hidden secret. The role he plays here as the bossed-about middle brother, Peter, who is about to have a baby with a woman he is on the brink of divorcing, affords him more comedy moments than he’s had in his entire career. “I understand why, because I’m known for my serious roles. It’s especially difficult looking for comic work when you’ve spent most of your career trying to prove yourself in those roles. This is why actors get typecast. If you don’t do enough comedy it’s hard for studios to offer you jobs.”

As a teenager, and later as a graduate of the New York’s Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts (inspiration for TV’s Fame) and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Brody had a taste for the wild side that he’s never quite lost. In 1992 he was nearly killed in a motorcycle accident. The injuries took months to heal.Growing up in Queens, when hip-hop was still raw and rebellious, is one of the reasons Brody was able to “get down” with the urban misfits he played so convincingly in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam (1999) and Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses (2000). He would have liked to have been the local Eminem if acting hadn’t got in the way. Yet this haunted punk has turned into Hollywood’s most principled charmer.

The Oscar hasn’t curbed Brody’s appetite for off-the-wall parts. In M. Night Shyamalan’s horror film The Village (2004), he plays a squawking, love-struck idiot. In The Jacket, he’s a shell-shocked war veteran. In Peter Jackson’s thrilling remake of King Kong he is the doomy romantic scriptwriter. And in Allen Coulter’s old-fashioned whodunnit Hollywood-land, Brody is terrific as a seedy private eye investigating the death of the television actor who played the original Superman (George Reeves). Academy fame has gifted him many more choices in what roles he can take on.

But what about his reputation for tinkering with scripts. The bonhomie freezes. “Tinker? I tinker?” Brody’s horror is genuine. “I didn’t really have that much dialogue to tinker with here,” he adds, suddenly more wary. “Wes is very specific. I respect people’s specificity. If I don’t believe in the truth of a moment I will try and make it more truthful. I often reduce my dialogue rather than embellish it.” The warmth returns to his voice.

“Sometimes a scene looks really good on the page. But if I know I can be more truthful and succinct without jeopardising what’s being said, I think that serves us all better.” He adds wryly: “Terrence Malick did say to me I would have been a great silent-film clown if I’d been around in another era. I wasn’t sure if he meant that after he cut all my lines out of his movie (The Thin Red Line). But I think there was something kind about that comment. Somewhere.”

The Darjeeling Limited is the Closing Night Gala on Nov 1, 7pm, at Odeon Leicester Square; it goes on general release on Nov 23

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