Guy Pearce: ‘I did a lot of bad films during my divorce – I needed the cash’
The actor, nominated for an Oscar and a BAFTA for his scene-stealing turn in The Brutalist, talks money, Neighbours and why he was terrible in Memento.
“I have many feelings about that show,” says Guy Pearce, aka Mike from Neighbours, the one with the cheekbones who, at the soap’s 1980s peak, shared scenes with Kylie and Jason and a bed with Jane
“In the old days you were either a theatre actor or a film actor, and if you got stuck in a soap you were the lowest of the low – but what an opportunity. I had no clue what I was doing but learnt a lot. When young actors ask me for advice, I shrug and say, ‘Get lucky?’ Because I got lucky.
“That said, it really was frowned upon,” Pearce continues, of a show he was in from 1986 to 1989 and that he even turned up to say goodbye to in its 2022 finale.
“I did a play a year after I left and this snobby actress said, ‘How could you even do that?’ I wanted to punch her!” Pearce stops – over a gloriously freewheeling hour that takes in divorce, self-criticism and the damning of an entire nation, the actor really does have a habit of simply blurting stuff out.
“Now, obviously, I didn’t punch her,” he corrects himself. “But it was such a horrible attitude.” He smiles. “And then, five years later, I saw her on some shit ad on TV. I so wanted to go and find her and say, ‘OK …’ ”
And just look at Pearce now – the one-time hunk of Ramsay Street, object of derision for snooty thesps, is an Oscar and BAFTA nominee for the first time; up for best supporting actor for his sturm und drang turn as Harrison Lee Van Buren, the industrialist and patron of the arts, in The Brutalist.
A charmer, bully, raconteur, horror – what a headline-grabbing performance. He’s not on screen until the 43rd minute but dominates henceforth.
He is in Melbourne, the city he has lived in and around since his family left England when he was three. He is 57 now, with dark-rimmed specs and wearing a plain grey T-shirt, apologising for the “moody” lighting in his lounge.
He is, understandably, immensely proud of his work in The Brutalist, but it is hardly his first critical darling – Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, LA Confidential, Memento, The Hurt Locker, The Proposition, Animal Kingdom on the big screen; Mildred Pierce and Mare of Easttown on the small.
It is a somewhat underrated CV. So, I ask, how does he pick his plum roles? “An instinctual response,” he says. So far, so actorly. “For story, character, director.” He sighs. “But I probably only do 5 per cent of what I read – I start every script hoping it will be another LA Confidential, that feeling you’ve been sucked into a vortex. But a lot of times, by page 20, I think, ‘Ah, damn.’ ”
Sure, but sometimes, I assume, the choice is more practical? “Yeah – I did a bunch of shit during my divorce because I needed the money,” he says, shrugging. Pearce divorced Kate Mestitz, his wife of 18 years, in 2015. “It was my divorce period, 2016, ’17 and ’18. I’d read scripts thinking, no, this is pretty good actually, I could do this …
“But a year earlier I would have said no. You’re forced to expand your tolerance of things when you need dough, so it was a real relief once I paid off my divorce. But it blurred my vision. I’d read something that I felt was good and then question myself. Is it good? Or just in the camp of paying off my divorce?”
Well, that’s honest. And from around that era it’s best to steer clear of Spinning Man (philosophy lecturer accused of leching), The Last Vermeer (poorly drawn Nazi art romp) and Brimstone (in which Pearce plays a reverend). He even wrote an entire album of sad acoustic songs about his break-up, called The Nomad.
“And I have an eight-year-old son now,” he adds about Monte, the child he shares with the Game of Thrones actor Carice van Houten, and another deciding factor in which parts he takes. Pearce and Van Houten have split up amicably, but she mostly lives with Monte in The Netherlands. “So sometimes I say no because I’ve just been away for three months and there’s no way I’m going to leave Carice and Monte on their own again.”
He really does have a refreshingly blunt way of going about life; honest and hilarious, like a man found alone at the end of a bar who is just happy to have someone to talk to. Take what he says about his role in The King’s Speech as the Duke of Windsor. “They said, ‘We really want you for this! You’re the only person. We, er, start in three weeks …’ ” He laughs. “And so you think, who just pulled out? Did Paul Bettany just pull out?”
And he is just getting started. I ask him about something he said recently – about how, after taking the lead in Christopher Nolan’s amnesia thriller Memento, he was not cast as Nolan’s Batman because some executive at Warner Bros took against Pearce. I point out that recalls Van Buren in The Brutalist, how the real power lies with the benefactors and how little of it an actor has.
“I need to add something,” he interrupts. “Because I’m having an existential crisis.” Go on … “I watched Memento the other day and I’m still depressed. I’m shit in that movie. I’d never thought that before, but I did this Q&A of Memento earlier this month and decided to actually watch the film again. But while it was playing I realised I hate what I did. And so all this stuff about an exec at Warners being why I’ve not worked with Chris again? It came crashing down. I know why I didn’t work with Chris again – it’s because I’m no good in Memento.”
What was Pearce’s problem with, erm, Pearce in the film? “I was trying to do a flippant attitude but it was all wrong. John Gielgud once said, ‘You can be good in a good movie, good in a bad movie, bad in a bad movie, but never be bad in a good movie.’ Yet I watched Memento and realised I’m bad in a good movie. F …!”
Has he mentioned this to Nolan? “No, because I reckon he’d agree with me. It’s funny; people say I should’ve been nominated for Memento. Now I understand why I wasn’t. Look, I’m pleased with LA Confidential, but I look at this and go, ‘Oof! Nails on a chalkboard!’ If I reckon my performance in Neighbours is two out of 10, Memento is a five …”
The Brutalist? A 10 out of 10 for me. As daft as this may sound, I liken Van Buren’s arrival in the film to the Tyrannosaurus rex in Jurassic Park. You wait and wait and then everything cowers in its presence.
Thematically the film is open to interpretation. “Someone asked about its political statement,” Pearce says. “Is it anti-Zionist? Pro-Zionist? I don’t know!” Does he expect the Oscars ceremony to be political? “It may be, with Trump back in and a number of things that feel precarious. You know, there’s a few things that I want to say publicly but I also want to maintain a career. And I most likely won’t be called up to say anything anyway.” (Kieran Culkin is the favourite for A Real Pain.)
One thing the film dissects is America, with the title referring to architecture and the American dream. This, I hint, dovetails nicely with Pearce’s own on-off relationship with the country and its film industry. “Well, there’s a Stockholm syndrome with America,” he says.
“There’s a domination yet that presence that America has is fraught with questionable ethics, morals and behaviours. Why does that country feel a need to say it’s the best? To meddle? Well, America’s a bully. It just steamrolls in and announces its stature and says we should all be thankful for it – and we all feed off it.
“My mother really recognised this,” he adds sweetly. Anne was English, a teacher who married Pearce’s New Zealander father, Stuart, an RAF test pilot who died in 1976 when Pearce was eight. “She was all about taste, my mum, and saw a lot of American culture as gaudy and loud. So when I had an opportunity to work there, I met it with trepidation, whereas others were like, ‘I’m going to Hollywood! To be famous!’ I felt that was gross. I had a reluctance to get on board.”
Yet he has gone back through the years. Despite a career often spent in Britain and Australia, Pearce also has taken roles in the blockbusters Prometheus and Iron Man 3, even an Adam Sandler comedy. Did he make peace with the US, or at least approach it with some healthy cynicism?
“Well, I changed my attitude because I was turning into a grumpy old man before I was 28,” he says. “I was bringing all this stuff my mother taught me when I was younger, and I was going to implode. So I came back to the States with an attitude change.
“I just don’t take it so seriously any more.”
Pearce smiles. “It’s a funny little precarious game but I feel like I’ve managed it pretty well,” he says of his four-decade career.
“I’ve certainly messed things up along the way but I’ve been lucky enough to be in some good ones too. But all these things are First World problems.”
He mentions his older sister, Tracy, who has an “intellectual disability” called Cornelia de Lange syndrome. “And life is hard for her,” he says.
“She doesn’t get the opportunities half of us get and has really struggled in life, so I’m just deeply grateful for any experiences, even shit ones. I just can’t not be aware of my sister’s existence in the world – and so any opportunity I’ve had feels like gold, really.”
The Times
The Brutalist is in cinemas.
