It’s tempting to think of Guy Pearce’s first Oscar nomination as overdue given how good he has been in so many films and TV dramas. Or to wonder whether the Australian actor sees it as validation for his stellar career as much as for playing American industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr in The Brutalist.
“The realising of these characters and the dynamics between them, I just found so beautiful”: Guy Pearce in Inside.Credit: Mathew Lynn
“I certainly don’t think of it as overdue,” Pearce says. “I see it as some sort of validation but I’m not looking for validation. The thing that is far more meaningful to me – and truly what it’s all about – is my response to my performance and when I look at the integrity of the movie and how good it is.
“When I look at the finished film and go ‘wow, that really works. That’s incredible’, that’s the validation, if you want to use that word.”
At the 97th Academy Awards on Monday, Pearce, 57, is up for best supporting actor against two Succession stars, Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain) and Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice), as well as Yura Borisov (Anora) and Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown).
“I don’t think I’ll win because Kieran keeps winning,” Pearce says on a Zoom call from his Los Angeles apartment, book-lined shelves and a guitar in the background. “But I know there can be upsets, as they call them, sometimes so I’d better have a speech in my back pocket just in case.”
In an era of Hollywood stars being scrupulously careful about what they say, taking advice from agents and publicists who are petrified of controversy, Pearce is refreshingly direct about contentious subjects.
Take the question of why he wore a Free Palestine badge on the red carpet at the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards this month.
“I want it known, I suppose, that I completely disagree with what’s happened to Palestine and what Israel is doing to Palestine,” he says. “I just find it the most disgraceful, disgusting thing to witness and I find it a real shame that certain media outlets are pressured into telling only one side of the story.”
While Israel blames Hamas for starting the war that has devastated Gaza, Pearce believes that adding his voice to Palestinian support feels worthwhile.
“I’m not overly articulate so I’m never going to be able to change anyone’s mind,” he says. “I feel if I speak up about something to a greater degree than I’m capable of then I’ll get shot down in flames. But I implore anyone to try and convince me that killing innocent children is a good thing.”
Pearce is just as upfront about why he chose certain films in his career: he “needed some dough” after his 2015 divorce from psychologist Kate Mestitz.
“I joke and I say they’re my divorce movies,” he says. “Someone will say ‘I didn’t know you played a character going through a divorce’,” I’ll say, ‘no, I was going through the divorce and I just needed to pay for it’.
Guy Pearce, who was nominated for best actor in a film for The Convert, on the AACTA Awards red carpet.Credit: Getty Images for AFI
“So I chose a couple of crappy jobs through 2016, ’17, ’18. I did some good ones as well but I chose a couple of crappy ones.”
When he talks about watching himself in Memento, Christopher Nolan’s brilliantly inventive 2000 thriller, before a Q&A at London’s Barbican Cinema this year, Pearce is just as brutally frank. It’s a different kind of brutalist to the visionary architect played by Adrian Brody in Brady Corbet’s 10-time Oscar-nominated historical epic.
“I’m sitting there going ‘ah, no’, watching myself do this really insincere shit,” he says. “Then the film finished and they introduced me and I had to walk on stage. It was like the walk of shame. I felt terrible.”
The previous week he had watched The Brutalist “and I loved what I did … I’ve got so many more years of experience so it makes sense but [Memento] was a shock to the system.”
Sometimes Pearce’s openness results in unwanted headlines. On The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast this month, he choked up talking about Kevin Spacey’s allegedly abusive behaviour on the set of the 1997 crime drama LA Confidential.
“I was sort of scared of Kevin because he’s quite an aggressive man – extremely charming and brilliant at what he does,” Pearce said. “But I was young and susceptible, and he targeted me, no question.”
He added that the only time he felt safe on the set was when the disgraced actor turned his attention to fellow Australian Simon Baker, who was “10 times prettier than I am”.
First Oscar nomination: Guy Pearce in The Brutalist.Credit: A24
Spacey immediately hit back in an angry video on X, saying: “Guy, you need to grow up. You are not a victim. We worked together a long time ago. If I did something then to upset you, you could have reached out to me …
“Here you are now, on a mission some 28 years later after I’ve been through hell and back to do what – just in time to stop the bad guy? What took you so long?”
Pearce has declined to respond to Spacey’s comments.
The reason for the Zoom a week before the podcast is Pearce’s latest Australian film – writer-director Charles Williams’ prison drama Inside. He plays a long-term prisoner on the verge of parole, Warren Murfett, who wants to steer a troubled young prisoner (Vincent Miller) away from a hated child killer (Cosmo Jarvis). He also hopes to reconnect with his estranged son (Toby Wallace).
The first feature film for Williams, whose All These Creatures won the short film Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2018, Inside is an intense, emotional story about intergenerational damage and the possibilities for rehabilitation in prison.
Pearce wanted to be involved as soon as he read the script. “The realising of these characters and the dynamics between them, I just found so beautiful,” he says. “Something like Inside, where we see the vulnerability, we see the manipulation, we see the power games, we see the precarious nature of connections between human beings – that’s the stuff I’m really interested in.”
Pearce sat down with Williams and heard about family members of his who had been in and out of prison and the shame they felt which pervades Inside.
“I just loved talking to him,” he says. “I watched his short film and thought, well, I’m doing this movie. There’s no question about it.”
“It was like the walk of shame. I felt terrible”: Guy Pearce in Memento.
Three years ago, Pearce brought a light touch to returning as Mike Young – he jokes he’s now Mike Old – for what was intended to be the Neighbours finale until Amazon gave the soap a new life then, just last week, axed it again. In The Brutalist, he gave a raffish Clark Gable charm to the power-hungry and manipulative van Buren.
As a character actor, Pearce has excelled since he shone as a bitchy drag queen in The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert (1994) then broke through in Hollywood as an ambitious police lieutenant in LA Confidential.
He has shone as a street smart detective in Animal Kingdom (2010), abdicating King Edward VIII in The King’s Speech (2010) and, on TV, a dashing upper-class lover in Mildred Pierce (2011), a troubled lawyer turned investigator and debt collector in the Jack Irish series (2012-21) and double agent Kim Philby in A Spy Among Friends (2022).
Such was his suspicion of big commercial movies earlier in his career that he opted for “odd” films such as Woundings (1998) and Ravenous (1999) when there was interest in him playing Wolverine in the X-Men films and Agent Smith in The Matrix.
But after working back to back on films, including tough shoots on The Count of Monte Cristo (2002) and The Time Machine (2002), Pearce says he was exhausted and “being horrible to everyone”. So he spent a month by himself in a remote community north of Broome, giving up alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana and reading about spirituality, especially Tibetan Buddhism.
Guy Pearce and director Charles Williams on the set of Inside.Credit: Mathew Lynn
“Hollywood is a difficult place to deal with,” he said at the time. “The film industry is a difficult thing to deal with. Generally, going on that ride when your fame increases and your fee increases and your name increases, I find silly. I just had to get away from it.”
While he seems to have been busy lately, Pearce says he has been trying to slow down since the birth of his son Monte, now eight, with Dutch actor Carice van Houten. He wants to get back to Amsterdam, where they live, to see Monte as much as possible.
“I’m really aware of how valuable a break is in between films, getting home, just making music, obviously spending time with Monte and Carice,” he says. “Really recharging – that’s so valuable to me.”
After media gossip when the couple went to the BAFTAs together, van Houten posted about their relationship on Instagram. “He and I are great friends and love each other very much, but we haven’t been a couple for years,” she wrote. “I am, however, very proud to say we are in a wonderful partnership raising the true love of our lives – our beautiful son and his hamster. The end.”
As far back as when he was mobbed as a teenage Neighbours star, Pearce has had an uneasy relationship to fame. He once admitted how uncomfortable he felt when he and Mestitz were upgraded from economy to business on a flight. Does he still feel awkward about moments like that?
“Yeah,” Pearce says. “I’m just very aware of the imbalance of things [but] I’ve gotten better at dealing with it …
“The closest point of reference for me is my sister [Tracy]. I see the struggle that she has in life with her intellectual disability. And not just her, many people out there in the world. For me to get preferential treatment not only feels a bit silly, it kind of feels – I don’t want to say it’s insulting but it makes me a bit sad about how we function with each in life.”
Pearce says he understands why people get excited when they see a famous person.
“I do too. I go to these award shows and there’s some amazing actor standing over there. I’ll go, ‘wow’. So I get it but … I just try to not get too caught up in it.
“It just makes me go, if I’m going to be a recognised, well-known person then at least I should make sure I do good work and that it’s justified, if a word like justified can be used.”
Inside opens in cinemas on February 27. The Academy Awards are on March 3.
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