As film credits roll, Guy Pearce nominated for The Australian’s Australian of the Year

Acclaimed Australian actor Guy Pearce is poised for major film industry honours, including an overdue Oscar, and he is also nominated for The Australian’s Australian of the Year.

Guy Pearce in The Brutalist.

Will 2025 be the year Guy Pearce finally gets his Oscar flowers?

You might think that surely the actor who has starred in garlanded movies such as LA Confidential, Memento and Best Picture winners The Hurt Locker and The King’s Speech has at least a nomination to his name.

Alas, you’d be wrong. Since breaking out in 1994’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Pearce has consistently delivered standout performances, yet has not earned the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ nod.

All signs point to that being rectified this year, thanks to his chilling performance in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.

The film, a Silver Lion winner at Venice, and one of last year’s most talked-about releases, features a career-best Adrien Brody as Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian Jewish refugee who, after escaping the atrocities of World War II, finds himself in post-war America. Once a celebrated architect, Laszlo now drifts, designing avant-garde furniture for his cousin’s stuffy Philadelphia business, Miller & Sons.

His tenure there is brief, and soon he forms a far darker, more complicated relationship with a millionaire patron, Pearce’s predatory Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.

Pearce’s role marks one of the best Hollywood comeback stories of the year.

The standout performance, along with his body of work, also merits the Geelong-based actor’s nomination for The Australian’s Australian of the Year.

Pearce has shone in a year when Australians – including veterans Naomi Watts and the queen of Tinseltown, Nicole Kidman – were a dominant force in film and television. All three actors, industry big names since the 1990s, have earned Golden Globe nominations this year.

But Pearce has been the most celebrated Australian star of the past 12 months.

The Brutalist, critics agree, could well be Pearce’s finest performance yet. The New Yorker called him “magnificent”, The New York Times hailed him as “tremendous”. Along with his Golden Globe nomination, Pearce has earned a nomination for the Critics Choice Awards.

Last year, Pearce starred in four films, including David Cronenberg’s film festival favourite, The Shrouds.

He has collaborated with a long list of directors of impeccable pedigree – Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan, Curtis Hanson, Kathryn Bigelow and Todd Haynes, to name a few.

Perhaps this year, the Academy will recognise what so many others have long seen.

And he has a chance to also be recognised as our Australian of the Year.

To nominate the 2024 Australian of the Year, email [e-mail]. Please include your name and contact details (this information is collected solely for this award and will not be used for any other purpose). The winner will be announced on Saturday, January 25, 2025.