Guy Pearce on The Brutalist, awards ceremonies and his ‘funny’ Neighbours Emmy nomination

Guy Pearce has revealed some startling thoughts on acting awards ahead of the Golden Globes and the release of the acclaimed The Brutalist.

Guy Pearce might be nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama for his role in acclaimed epic The Brutalist at Monday’s Golden Globes, but he’s not really sure how he feels about it.

“I am a bit confused, I suppose,” he says. “I’ve seen people win awards and I thought ‘really?’ and then I’ve seen other people not win awards and gone ‘really?’ So I don’t know what I think about it all to be honest.”

It’s not the veteran Aussie actor’s first brush with awards glory. In 2011 he took home the Outstanding Supporting Actor In a Limited Series or Movie Primetime Emmy for his role opposite Kate Winslet in Todd Haynes’ historical drama Mildred Pearce.

And then this year – 38 years after the role made him a household name in Australia and the UK – he was nominated at the Daytime Emmys as Outstanding Guest Performer in a Drama Series for playing Mike Young in the rebooted Neighbours. It’s not too difficult to discern which one he took more seriously.

“They wanted me to go and some of them went – but I was shooting I think so I couldn’t go anyway,” Pearce says with a chuckle of his surprise Neighbours nomination. “It was flattering, I have to say, but it was pretty funny. It did make me laugh.”

Guy Pearce and Annie Jones in the rebooted Neighbours.

Pearce speaks fondly of his time on Neighbours early in his career – he first left in 1989 to embark on an international career that has yielded hits such LA Confidential, Memento, The King’s Speech and Iron Man 3 – and his return to what he thought was going to be an emotional full stop when it was finally cancelled in 2022. But whether last year’s reboot, which saw the now England-based Mike finally farewell the show by breaking it off with long-lost love Jane, is in fact his last hurrah … well, time will tell.

“There’s a couple of times I thought it was done but it’s like the gift that keeps giving,” he says. “But who knows? He will probably reappear at some point or another.”

That’s not to say that Pearce is down on awards as such, it’s rather that he wants to feel like he’s earned it.

“I’m sure if I was to win an award I’d go ‘wow – that was great, pretty cool’,” he says.

“I think as long as I felt like what I’d done was worthy of it. I won an award once and I felt pretty positive about it because I felt like between what Todd Haynes and I did, we both created a character that was pretty good.”

That being the case, if Pearce was to come up trumps for his role as mega rich industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren in The Brutalist, it would come with a deep sense of satisfaction. He is almost in awe of the nearly four-hour historical drama – about brilliant Hungarian Jewish architect Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) who survives the Holocaust and emigrates to America – and its writer-director Brady Corbet.

Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce in a scene from The Brutalist.

After a fiery first meeting, Pearce’s driven, powerful and ruthless Van Buren recognises Toth’s genius and takes him under his wing, engaging him to build a vast community centre in honour of his mother that will also cement his legacy as a man of consequence and importance.

The epic film, which deals with weighty themes such as artistic drive and ego, the immigrant experience, sexual abuse, power imbalance and the rapaciousness of American capitalism, has already impressed on the festival circuit and is up for seven Golden Globes on Monday including Best Motion Picture Drama, Best Director, Best Actor for Brody, Best Supporting Actress for Felicity Jones as well as Pearce’s nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

For Pearce, who had been impressed with Corbet’s earlier films as a director Vox Lux and The Childhood of a Leader, the script for The Brutalist was like nothing he’d ever quite read before and he knew he had to be involved.

“Brady as a filmmaker just has a very particular style and a very particular way of presenting something as a filmmaker where you are just undone,” Pearce says. “I think all great filmmakers have that ability. It’s a real artistry and a real skill and I don’t think there are many filmmakers who can do that. I think he’s quite the genius really.

“I think that everybody felt the same way about Brady. Everybody’s sort of went ‘we’re lucky to be involved in this’.”

Pearce says he was fascinated by Van Buren’s “greed and need to control” that give him a sense of entitlement and power that enable him to do terrible things. While the character appreciates Toth’s genius and artistry, they also highlight his own flaws, mediocrity and envy, which Pearce likens to a safari hunter killing a tiger to feel powerful.

Felicity Jones with Adrien Brody, Brady Corbet and Guy Pearce at a special BAFTAs screening of The Brutalist.

“The need to have power of course leads to the intoxication and then you want more power,” Pearce says. “Once you’ve got one, you want 10. Once you’ve got 10 you want 100 and so it’s this insatiability that is a quality in him.”

Though it wasn’t an inspiration at the time, in hindsight Pearce sees some parallels between former and future US president Donald Trump and Van Buren, although he insists the latter has a lot more taste and sophistication.

“Coincidentally just a few weeks ago I started watching that Netflix documentary on Trump and obviously in that when Trump is young we see the connection between him and his father and trying to, not necessarily just outdo his father, but trying to impress his father,” Pearce says.

“There’s this idea of self-belief and this idea you can have anything you want and you can be the biggest and the best at whatever you want. It’s a dangerous idea I think because you can become so narrow and fixated and it’s not great for you, and it’s not great for all the people who you push out of the way along the way.”

So positive was Pearce’s experience making The Brutalist – and such his is joy at the final film – that he’s already told Corbet to keep him in mind for any future project, no matter what the role.

“I’ve said to Brady since making the film, ‘mate, anything you want me to do from now on, I’ll come and do it. I don’t care about the character – if you want me to play the postman who delivers one letter, I know it’s going to be an interesting postman’.”

Guy Pearce at The Gothams 34th Annual Film Awards at Cipriani Wall Street last month. Picture: Getty Images

Though he’s now based in Holland with his partner Carice Van Houten, of Game Of Thrones fame, and their eight-year-old son Monte, and his work takes him all around the world, Pearce says he likes to get back to Australia every year if he can. Around this time last year he was back in Melbourne making the Aussie prison drama Inside with Shogun star Cosmo Jarvis, which had its premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival and opens in cinemas in February.

And there is still the tantalising prospect of a sequel to his breakout movie, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, which celebrated its 30th birthday this year. Discussions have been had, Pearce says, but it’s still very much a work in progress.

“If there’s a script that we all think is worthwhile, then we’ll certainly consider it,” he says. “We were in talks a while ago, but we haven’t really followed up on anything recently, so I’m not really sure to be honest.”

And in the meantime for the mad Geelong Cats fan, there will always be a small corner of Holland that will forever be Australia, courtesy of a very well used Sherrin that stands out like a sore thumb in the soccer-mad country.

“As long as Monte’s happy to kick the Aussie rules ball around with me, then that’s fine,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t need to try and convert anyone from the Netherlands but it is funny when people watch what we’re doing and wonder what shaped ball that is.”

The Brutalist opens in cinemas on January 23. The Golden Globes screen on Monday from 11am on Channel 10.