ALICANTE, Spain

ONE night early last spring Adrien Brody found himself among unusual company. “It’s the middle of the night,” he recalled, “and I’m running with Cayetano through open fields, with hundreds of bulls.”

Mr. Brody was in southern Spain, near Córdoba, and Cayetano is the latest matador in Spain’s most famous bullfighting dynasty, the Ordoñez family. “I’m this young man from Queens,” Mr. Brody said, “and here I am running to show these guys that I’m man enough to handle what they want me to experience.”

He passed the test. In the coming months he would train with Cayetano and another celebrated bullfighter, Espartaco (Augustín Espartinas), to prepare for his title role in “Manolete,” a film about the last years of the consummate Franco-era torero (whose real name was Manuel Rodríguez y Sánchez), who was fatally injured in the ring in 1947. Mr. Brody’s dedication earned him uncommon respect from the matadors who tutored him, and his willingness to immerse himself in the role, coupled with his startling resemblance to the actual Manolete, led to a warm reception by ordinary Spaniards.

This for an actor not known for his physical machismo. As with his surprising lead role in Peter Jackson’s remake of “King Kong,” Mr. Brody is exploring new territory in “Manolete,” which is scheduled to open next fall.

An actor’s task of course is to become what he is not, and Mr. Brody, who received an Academy Award for his unsettling portrayal of a Holocaust survivor in “The Pianist,” does that better than most. But in playing a Spanish bullfighter, he may have found, on and off screen, his most complicated role yet.

Past American films like the 1915 “Carmen” or the 1941 “Blood and Sand” have featured matadors barely more complex than those in cartoons like “Picador Porky”: the role is usually a caricature of Spanish masculine bravery. To be fair, Spain itself has long encouraged the image. Especially during Franco’s dictatorship, the government routinely marketed the country abroad through a couple of stock characters — the passionate flamenco dancer and the stoic bullfighter — and distracted Spaniards from their society’s repression and economic misery by promoting matadors and movie stars as cultural heroes. (Even Pedro Almodóvar played with the archetype in his early film “Matador.”)

Though less so than in the past, Spaniards still equate bullfighting with bravery, which is why Mr. Brody was running with the bulls at midnight in a barren Córdoban field. Cayetano Rivera Ordoñez, son of Paquirri (Francisco Rivera Pérez), a promising torero who was mortally wounded in the ring in 1984, and grandson of Antonio Ordoñez, the bullfighter Hemingway wrote of in “Death in the Afternoon,” began his professional career last year with tremendous fanfare after first studying film at the University of Southern California.

“He showed me the lifestyle,” Mr. Brody said over lunch in his trailer on the set. “For about a week, I followed him from fight to fight to see what a torero goes through. A lot of the life takes place on the road, so he’d fight, and then we’d rest in the car. Or sometimes we would put on the outfits and walk around, just talking.”

If Cayetano schooled the actor in a matador’s lifestyle, Espartaco instructed him “in how to really face a bull,” Mr. Brody said. Though neither speaks the other’s language, the two spent hours practicing the cape-work essential to the bullfighter’s art and rehearsed the easy carriage and erect posture central to Manolete’s signature style.

“As a bullfighter, Manolete had a vertical nonchalance,” Mr. Brody said, “so Espartaco had to do a lot of research. He was always keeping me on track about how Manolete would have done it.”

What Espartaco couldn’t teach was how to overcome fear. “I’m talking about the fear you have when you know something is going to happen,” Espartaco said in an interview, “that you or the bull is going to die. It’s physical, and also mental, because the bullfighter is in a difficult situation and has to survive. But at that moment he doesn’t feel capable of it.”

Like all beginning matadors, Mr. Brody trained with calves rather than full-grown bulls, but even these younger animals charge with a fury.

“You should understand what you’re facing, as an individual and as a character,” he said. “So I had to fight a real bull, or rather, a young, angry calf.”

His mentor was impressed. “When the calf came out,” Espartaco said, “Adrien put himself directly in front of it, which is really commendable. He never backed off.”

Though Manolete was revered in Spain for the calm he displayed while staring down death, that great bullfighter was, as Mr. Brody discovered, tormented in private. “Manolete’s life was very difficult — there’s a certain sadness to him,” the actor said. “He grew up in extreme poverty, and he was fighting bulls at a very early age to become someone” — someone, it turned out, more comfortable in the ring than out of it.

The director, Menno Meyjes, said the film was “about a man in love with death who meets a woman in love with life.”

The movie emphasizes the tangle of unresolved personal relationships that bound Manolete when he died, especially his turbulent love affair with the actress Antoñita Sino (played by Penélope Cruz), called Lupe, a proudly independent woman of questionable reputation loathed by the torero’s possessive mother, Angustias.

So far Spaniards appear to have embraced Mr. Brody’s embodiment of Manolete, aided by his striking physical likeness to the matador. The resemblance, which Mr. Brody himself called “uncanny,” encouraged him to sign on to the film when, several years ago, Mr. Meyjes showed him documentary images of Manolete.

While shooting in Spain, Mr. Brody learned just how startling that resemblance is. “People see me in the streets and call out ‘Maestro!’ ” he said, “or ‘Suerte!,’ ” the Spanish expression for “best of luck.”

Mr. Brody faced a less predictable challenge in taking on the role: as an animal lover, he stands against the ritual killing of bulls, which has taken place in Spain for centuries.

“When we did the fighting with the calf, I didn’t want it to be picked,” he said, adding with a laugh, “even if afterwards it could go back to its field and tell its friends it got to fight Adrien Brody.”

When news of the movie was first released, the animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals denounced it, but Mr. Brody and Ms. Cruz (who has been a spokeswoman for the group) stipulated that they would participate only if no animals were harmed. Accordingly Mr. Meyjes’s production team relied on a mechanical bull and computer effects to depict the killings.

The animal-rights group praised the decision, and Lola Films, which is marketing the movie, strongly resists any description of “Manolete” as a bullfighting film, promoting it instead as a love story. Yet there is no skirting the fact that in Spain, Manolete holds prominence as a tragically heroic torero, and that, regardless of the film’s creative angle, many Spanish viewers will anticipate the story’s bullfighting scenes, even as some foreign audiences will be more aware of the controversy surrounding bullfighting today.

Mr. Brody readily acknowledged his own ambivalence toward the subject matter of the film and his role in it.

“It’s a very complex situation,” he said, “so I’m figuring it out, and trying to be honest.”

Correction: Sept. 24, 2006

An article last week about the making of the bullfighting film “Manolete” referred incorrectly to Ernest Hemingway’s book about Antonio Ordoñez, grandfather of Cayetano Rivera Ordoñez, a matador who helped train the film’s star, Adrien Brody. Antonio Ordoñez was a subject of “The Dangerous Summer,” Hemingway’s nonfiction account of a season of bullfighting, not “Death in the Afternoon.” In addition, the article also misstated the real name of another torero, Espartaco, who helped train Mr. Brody. He is Juan Antonio Ruiz Román, not Augustín Espartinas. (Mr. Espartinas is Mr. Brody’s double in the film.)