Oscar winner Adrien Brody plays the village idiot in M Night Shyamalan's latest creepfest, but what this unclassifiable character actor really hankers after is to be a heroic good guy, he tells Michael Dwyer

Directors seeking out adventurous, intensely committed actors have been casting Adrien Brody since he first came to prominence 11 years ago, down the credits of Steven Soderbergh's King of the Hill. Since then, Brody has flexed his skills in a range of edgy portrayals, notably in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam, Ken Loach's Bread and Roses, Barry Levinson's Liberty Heights, Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, and Roman Polanski's The Pianist, which earned him the Best Actor Oscar last year, making him, at 29, the youngest ever winner of that award.

Nevertheless, when we met in his native New York last week, it became clear that Brody hankers after acceptance as an all-American leading man. Tall, lean and very smartly dressed, Brody is an animated and expansive conversationalist, but he cannot resist returning to this topic.

Writer-director M Night Shyamalan got more of the same when he called Brody and offered him a role in his new movie, The Village, which opens in the US today. Brody had auditioned for Shyamalan's previous picture, Signs, only to lose out to Joaquin Phoenix. "It's an inevitable fact of an actor's life that you don't get most of the roles you audition for," Brody says. "I guess Joaquin was more suited to playing Mel Gibson's brother, and that's it, that's the role.

"When Night called me about The Village, he asked me what I was interested in doing at the time. I was very honest with him and I told him I wanted to play an all-American leading man, the guy who gets the girl. There was silence on the phone and then Night said, 'Well, this isn't that'."

Shyamalan had cast Phoenix in the leading role of The Village. Because of the startling twists in the storyline, a motif of Shyamalan's screenplays, he was fiercely protective of his new screenplay and so determined to keep these secrets secret that he didn't allow the cast to show the script to anyone, not even their agents.

"Night said he didn't know if he wanted to send me the script if I wasn't interested in doing the film," Brody recalls. "I said I didn't know if I could consider the movie if I didn't get to read the script." Shyamalan also was unsure if Brody, who now had an Oscar under his belt, would accept a supporting role in the movie.

"Larger isn't necessarily better," says Brody. "It's not the size of the prize; it's the motion in the ocean. The offer came to me at an interesting time. I was looking for a kind of iconic leading man role at the time, but I didn't find that. This is more along the lines of what has inspired me in my career and I felt that I didn't want to suddenly change my methods of picking work."

Shyamalan's spookiest, most stylishly achieved movie to date, The Village is steeped in atmosphere as it depicts a close-knit reclusive community in late 19th-century Pennsylvania. They live in a remote village surrounded by woods apparently populated by predatory creatures, and the climate of fear engendered by the elders inevitably prompts present-day, post-9/11 parallels. The fine ensemble cast includes Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt and Brendan Gleeson.

Brody went through whole stretches of The Pianist without speaking, and doesn't get to utter more than a few grunts, laughs and yells in The Village, in which he plays a mentally unbalanced villager.

"There are advantages to not having dialogue, and I can respond to that," he says. "It's often easier for the actor to connect to the emotional truth of a role when there's less to fill your mouth with. Unless your lines are brilliant and you connect with them, they could be conflicting with the emotions you're trying to express."

The challenge, he says, was not to play his character on a superficial level. "I didn't want to fall into any clichés. It's not necessarily just representative of someone who is mentally handicapped because there are other underlying elements involved with him. In spending time with mentally handicapped people, what I found most endearing was that they are more honest, open and sensitive than most adults.

"They may be more reactive and have less control over their emotions, but their emotions are pure and that is the essence of it. I also liked the boyish quality of the character - there's a mischievousness that we all have as boys, and as we get older, that's suppressed - so it was liberating to play someone with a different set of boundaries."

Why are so many actors - and Oscar voters - drawn so irresistibly to mentally challenged characters? "I think that actors are attracted to playing characters who are very different from themselves," Brody says. "It offers you a chance of exploring ways of seeing and being that you don't know and you don't consider in any depth unless someone directly in your life is affected by an illness or a condition.

"As an actor, you have an opportunity to learn all these things that are not part of your daily life and you get a better understanding of them and, hopefully, of yourself. That's the most beautiful part of what I do. The inspiration and the love that I have for the work comes from this kind of material."

Brody's work in The Pianist earned him his first Oscar nomination last year. Pitted against four former winners (Jack Nicholson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Nicolas Cage and Michael Caine), he was ranked as an outsider for the prize.

"Obviously, I felt there was a chance, although it was slim," he says. "I didn't know if everyone who could vote would have even seen The Pianist. Basically, I prepared myself to not win. When Halle Berry read out my name, it didn't sound like any name I was familiar with. It was really strange. It seemed like it all happened in slow motion."

Winning the Oscar opened doors and made him more acceptable to film producers. "It definitely made me much more famous than any work that I've done. It's amazing what that one moment can do. I'm exactly the same as I always was, but suddenly people have a different perception of me. And, of course, there's also all this extra attention as a result of that. If I'm hanging around with someone, someone else says I'm doing more than just that, and God forbid if the other person is pretty because it's assumed you're up to no good."

He's bemused by media stories of candle-lit pasta dinners in his apartment with Keira Knightley while they were shooting The Jacket recently. "That was funny, because I had no candles in my apartment and I was on a strict diet, with no pasta allowed. We were making a movie together and we were just hanging out, researching character and getting to know one another. We had dinner together, but that doesn't mean anything."

The Jacket is directed by John Maybury, the imaginative British director of the Francis Bacon picture Love Is the Devil, and scores of music videos, most famously Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U. "I play a US GI who's sent home from the first Gulf War with an injury and a memory lapse and is then implicated in a murder," Brody says. "He's put into a mental institution, where he's treated in very extreme ways. A man who is sane is put through an insane way of living. Within that, the film deals with past and present and the future, and there's a love story in there. It was a very heavy, emotional journey."

The role was originally offered to Mark Wahlberg. "Yeah, Mark gets those roles, those all-American leading man roles that have been a struggle for me to get. So, in a sense, I'm honoured to get the role that he could have played because that means that Hollywood is accepting me more than they have in the past. It is a big step for me. I understand how the business works. Producers make safe choices, and I think they couldn't see me in certain things because they didn't regard me as safe.

"It's easier to hire someone who's either already established or who has very simple looks. If you want to play an all-American guy, you don't even have to be American. You just have to look like what producers feel is American. I feel I've been accepted more within Europe, because producers and audiences there are less superficial when it comes to looks."

Next month Brody ventures into the mega-budget arena, playing a wartime pilot and co-starring with Naomi Watts and Jack Black in Peter Jackson's new treatment of King Kong. "It's a love story and a chance for me to play this really heroic guy in an epic story. That is the easiest decision I've ever had to make. It's so different from anything else I've done. I've never worked with special effects. There will be big action sequences, which I've never had an opportunity to do before. And Peter Jackson has not only mastered the technological side of it, but I also like him as a person and I think the working experience will be just what I need to do at this point in my life."

It also offers him a chance to tap into his boyish sense of mischief. "Exactly. It's a wild fun ride." Brody recently enjoyed another wild ride, indulging his passion for driving in a 3,500-mile car race across Europe through France, Spain and Morocco and back again with the help of a Xeroxed road map. He won.

"I am mischievous and I am talented behind the wheel, but I'm not as crazy as everyone else who was in the race. I feel I have a responsibility to not maim some poor person who's on the highway - and to my own family and loved ones not to kill myself. I pick and choose my own battles and what's important for me to win."

Brody would welcome a similar action role on screen, he says. "The problem is that they are so afraid of something happening to me that they probably won't let me do some of the stuff that I'm going to want to do in King Kong. I didn't go up for auditions for Gone in 60 Seconds, although there were roles in that I could have done, but I would love to do a movie in which I'm a car driver."

Maybe, I suggest, in the proposed remake of Bullitt. "Are they doing that? Who's making it? I would do that. Sure, I agree with you that it's sacrilegious, but if someone's going to do it, it might as well be me."

• The Village goes on Irish release from August 20th