A makeup artist on The Brutalist tried to remove Adrien Brody’s nose believing it to be a prosthetic, the actor has revealed.

Speaking to Jimmy Fallon earlier this week, Brody said that a new makeup artist began “busily working away with a solvent on my nose”.

Brody continued: “She’s just working away. And I said: ‘Are you trying to remove that?’ And she said: ‘Yes.’ And I said: ‘That doesn’t come off!”

The actor had been shooting scenes which occur late in the film, in which his character, a Hungarian architect, is elderly and using a wheelchair.

These scenes required considerably ageing makeup and hair dye, as well as light prosthetics. Brody said the makeup artist apologised, before adding: “This is going in my diary.”

Brody is frontrunner to win the best actor Oscar for his role in the film, 22 years after his victory for playing another Holocaust survivor, in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist.

Brady Corbet’s film The Brutalist is nominated for 10 Oscars, including best picture, best director and acting nods for Brody’s co-stars Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce.

Brody had his nose accidentally broken during a fight scene on Spike Lee’s 1999 film Summer of Sam, and has broken his nose on two other separate occasions.

The Brutalist makes frequent reference to his distinctive feature, with the suggestion that it was broken as a consequence of ill-treatment by the Nazis. Brody’s character, László Tóth, is not a real person, but Corbet took inspiration for him from the Hungarian postwar designer and architect Marcel Lajos Breuer.

Actors have frequently donned prosthetic noses the better to resemble historical figures in awards-bait biopics. A nose also loomed large in last year’s Oscars discourse: the false one worn by Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro.

Some critics felt its size was antisemitic – an accusation rejected by the conductor’s children, who collaborated on the film and said: “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose.”

Meryl Streep’s delicately proportioned false nose as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady helped the actor take her third Oscar in 2011. Nicole Kidman’s more substantial appendage in Virginia Woolf biopic The Hours secured Kidman her first win in 2003.

Announcing the win at the podium, presenter Denzel Washington said: “The Oscar goes to, by a nose, Nicole Kidman.”