A few years ago, as Guy Pearce filmed a television series in his native Australia, a young actress introduced herself by asking who his American agents were. She was determined to succeed in Hollywood, as she felt he had, and was eager to seek a shortcut.
Pearce was amused by her misplaced moxie. “The idea of rushing to Hollywood, I was in no rush whatsoever,” he said, adding, “I’m still not in any rush.”
You can see why she might have thought otherwise. After Pearce first broke out as a buff and bitchy drag queen in the 1994 comedy “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” Hollywood was poised to make him the next big thing. He soon landed leads in two stone-cold classics, “L.A. Confidential” and “Memento,” but Pearce found lumbering studio blockbusters like “The Time Machine” to be a poor fit for his talents and eventually withdrew from Hollywood’s leading-man rat race: Cheekbones be damned, he was a character actor at heart.
Since then, Pearce, 57, has mostly preferred to take small roles in big projects, appearing briefly in best-picture winners like “The King’s Speech” and “The Hurt Locker” while supporting Kate Winslet in two HBO shows, “Mildred Pierce” and “Mare of Easttown.” But Pearce’s lower profile is about to get a major jolt thanks to the new film “The Brutalist,” which has earned him a Golden Globe nomination and plenty of Oscar chatter.
In the three-and-a-half-hour drama directed by Brady Corbet, Pearce plays the moneyed Pennsylvania industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, who takes on the immigrant architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) as his new pet project. Van Buren is impressed by Tóth’s talent and commissions him to design a community center that could be the capstone to both men’s careers. But Van Buren alternates between encouraging and explosive, and Pearce’s compelling performance keeps both Tóth and the audience on their toes.
Though he now lives primarily in the Netherlands to be closer to the son he shares with the “Games of Thrones” actress Carice van Houten, the critical success of “The Brutalist” has made Pearce a hot commodity in Hollywood again. “It’s actually nice to reignite my relationship with L.A.,” he told me this month, when I caught up with him at a Hollywood movie theater the day before the Golden Globes.
Still, Pearce remains disinclined toward movie stardom Since he became known as a teen idol in Australia for appearing on the long-running soap “Neighbours,” he has been skeptical of fame.
“If people are screaming and trying to rip my shirt off me because I’ve got blue eyes, then that’s just ridiculous,” he said. “I’ve got a sister with an intellectual disability who’s teased in the street because she looks different, so the idea of me wanting attention and being famous for no reason is vacuous and meaningless when there are people in the world who are far less privileged.”
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
What was your initial experience when you came to Hollywood?
The first five years was tricky because I was really reluctant to come here. I just thought, “If I’m going to be out of work, I’d rather be out of work in Australia than in L.A.”
Why is that?
Well, why be out of work in a country you don’t even know? I’m not interested in my work as an actor being a competitive thing, and I felt like Hollywood and L.A. represented competition. I never hung out with other Aussies, but the one or two times I did, all the conversations were about “Who’s your agent?” and “How did you get that job?” It just kills my motivation for even being an actor.
As a young actor, had you ever aspired to become a big Hollywood movie star?
No, I hated that idea. I wasn’t that ambitious, I didn’t have that confidence in myself. I didn’t feel good about what I was doing in Australia yet, so I didn’t want to rush into the competitive nature of Hollywood. I would rather have stayed at home and perfected the craft a little bit.
You never had much use for being famous. Was that easier because you’d already experienced a level of fame on “Neighbours” and didn’t love it?
Exactly. I’d been on a soap in Australia from ’85 to ’89, and I really struggled with the fame side of it. I understood why Cary Grant or Brando was famous because they were amazing at what they did. I was famous for what? Nothing. It didn’t make any sense to me at all, so I got a taste of the vacuous nature of fame early on. This idea of chasing more of it in Hollywood just felt counterintuitive to me.
Now, I’m a lot better at actually going, “OK, I understand that a certain amount of fame helps you get more work.” But as far as my natural creative instincts, all of that stuff is just [expletive] and I want to look at a performance that I do in a movie and go, “Yeah, I did a good job there.” If I win an award for it, great, thank you very much. If I don’t, no problem. I’m fine with that.
Certainly, “The Brutalist” is raising your profile. One of the film’s few comic moments comes when Van Buren quite earnestly tells Tóth, “I find our conversations intellectually stimulating.”
I’ve seen the film three times and there’s quite a few laughs with my character. Laughs are an interesting thing in film because often they can come from pure comedy or from something uncomfortable, but I actually feel like if a character is particularly earnest in their way of living, that can seem quite funny sometimes, too. I get the sense that Van Buren is so serious in his controlling of the world that it’s sort of ridiculous in a way.
He’s also so insulated by his wealth that when he says something tactless, nobody around him is in a position to argue.
It’s funny how powerful money is and how much people will acquiesce because they think maybe a couple of bones might be thrown their way. But I feel like the interesting thing about Van Buren is something Brady said: “He needs to be sophisticated enough to recognize good art. He’s not a typical bull in a china shop, he needs to have some sensitivity.” That in itself is a good sort of dichotomy. You’ve got somebody who goes, “I’m so moved by this art, I wish I could do this myself. But I can take control of it. I can either own it or I can stamp it out.”
There’s an interesting metaphor here when it comes to Hollywood. In the same way that Tóth must put up with Van Buren because it’s the only way he can realize his vision, a young actor must often deal with morally objectionable people as they rise in Hollywood. Eventually, they may become inured to bad behavior.
One of the things somebody said to me early on was, “As much as there are young actors wanting to be discovered in Hollywood, there are just as many people who want to be the one to have discovered them.” That really stuck with me, that someone will actually go, “Please let me show you off to people.” Great, fantastic. As long as you don’t try and [expletive] me.
Well, but. Sometimes that is the thing.
Of course. It makes sense that there are people out there who don’t have the talent but want to be the one to say, “Look, I brought you Russell Crowe or Hugh Jackman.” It’s funny, the idea of the patron and the artist and how that works. In a way, that’s what’s great about this film, because have we seen a film in a while that’s been about that, where those two worlds collide?
It sounds like when you first came to Hollywood, you had a healthy skepticism about those rich and powerful people that other newcomers might not have possessed.
Well, I was seduced by it, but I could feel the cynicism. And funnily enough, my mum was really anti-American. She’s from the north of England. She was a beautiful, sensitive, gorgeous, loving woman, but she was a cynical piece of work as well. With that thing where a lot of the world idolizes America, she went, “Oh, please.” She was all about taste and class and sophistication.
One of the greatest dismays for my mother is that my father died on the 6th of August, 1976, and Elvis Presley died on the 16th of August, 1977. So every year as she had to mourn the death of her husband, who she adored, the whole world mourned Elvis Presley, who she just thought was a hip-swinging [expletive].
I would imagine that helped shape your skeptical attitude toward idolatry and Hollywood.
Also, when I was on TV in Australia, no one then was trying to go to Hollywood apart from Paul Hogan, Nicole Kidman, and Mel Gibson. It just wasn’t a done thing. It would be like going, “I flew on an airplane, so I’m going to go to the moon next week.” One of the funniest things Russell ever said to me was that he and I were the last two over the bridge before they took the toll off.
I think people in Australia eventually went, “Hang on a second. What are we doing wasting our time in Melbourne and Sydney when we can go to Hollywood?” So the Chris Hemsworths, the Heath Ledgers, all those people kind of went, “I’ll do one job and then go to Hollywood, thanks,” and fair enough, good on them. Heath was great, Hugh’s great, nothing disparaging about anybody who took advantage of it. But we saw a real shift where Australian actors would go, “I’m going to go to theater school so that I can get an American agent.”
Something similar happens with directors nowadays, too. Independent filmmakers will direct one movie and then eagerly join up with Marvel.
You start to realize, especially in the studio system, that they want talent and someone who got hot off that last job, but they also want to control you. I think that’s a bit of a journey for a lot of filmmakers, but to be honest, I’m an old white guy and I’m talking about how things were in the ’90s and 2000s. I suppose that I don’t fully know how it works these days. I’m back here in L.A. quite a bit over these last couple of months promoting this film and rekindling my relationship with Hollywood and going, “Is it the same, or is it different?”
I don’t know that anyone has a good grasp on the movie industry as it is today.
Something like “The Brutalist” may be a bit of a flash in the pan, but hopefully it has a certain sort of appeal that makes people go, “We want to go back to old-fashioned filmmaking.” But I’m 57, I can’t guess what 20-year-olds want.
I do find that a lot of younger people are cinephiles in a very specific way. They rate movies on Letterboxd, they go to see Christopher Nolan movies in the best possible format. I can see how “The Brutalist,” which is shot in VistaVision and employs an intermission, might appeal to them.
No matter how old you are, we are all addicted to TikTok and Facebook and social media and the fast scrolling of videos. Still, I think there must be a desire to just sit in a comfy chair and go, “I just want to spend two or three hours with something,” rather than having everything be snappy, snappy, snappy.
The flip side of that is a lot of people will spend several hours watching a streaming series they don’t particularly like, but they’re reluctant to watch a well-reviewed three-hour movie.
And do you think the difference is that the 10 hours is on their own couch versus three and a half hours in a cinema?
It’s not just that it’s on their own couch, it’s that they can still look at their phones while they’re watching TV. To go to something like “The Brutalist” is to essentially surrender your phone for three and a half hours.
Yeah. It’s a commitment before you even start.
I wonder if people realize that may be part of why they hesitate, because it’s almost like breaking an addiction for them.
And the funny thing is, the intermission is a little bit of bait that makes people go, “I’m prepared to deal with three and a half hours because there’s this cool intermission thing in the middle. What’s that going to feel like?” It’s as if they’re going to go on some new ride they’ve not experienced, when really they’re just going to walk out and go to the loo and buy some M&Ms and have a quick chat about the first half.
But I do think we’re in the middle of a pendulum swing when it comes to the industry and moviegoing. I know the difficulties that exist in even getting a film off the ground, so when I watch something and go, “Ah, it wasn’t really for me,” I still come away going, “Oh my God, I have such appreciation for the fact that you even did that.”
Because you know too well how precarious things can be.
How does anyone get any film made these days? This falls apart, that falls apart, you can’t get this actor, the money falls away. I’ll get offered something out of the blue and they go, “No, no, we’ve always really wanted you. We start next week.” I’m like, “OK, Paul Bettany just pulled out, obviously.” But you just do it. You get on board.
It’s funny, because for a number of years, I had people saying to me, “‘L.A. Confidential’ was the last movie of its kind and ‘Memento’ was the first movie of its kind,” this new style of Chris Nolan filmmaking. To be part of those two worlds that were only three years apart was pretty cool, really. And so now, again, to be in the middle of this snappy generation with a three-and-a-half hour movie that everybody’s talking about, I’m so curious to see how that looks in a few years’ time.
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