How Guy Pearce Walked Away With The Brutalist, the Indie Movie of the Year

Lately, I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about Guy Pearce’s face. That dramatically protruding bone structure. The way the twin spears of his cheekbones echo the laser-cut jawline that comes to a fine point at the beveled edge of his chin. His cheeks are drawn taut, concave at their hollows, which causes the skin around them to crease when he smirks or grimaces. His eyes are deep-set. His brow is naturally arched, his nose is upturned, his lips naturally pursed. He looks wholesome and regal and sleazy, sacred and profane, like an angel who fucks. It raises the question: Why has an actor with these sculpted features spent the last two decades retreating from the center of the shows and films he’s worked on, seeking out opportunities to play cowards, freaks, and dickheads?

I admittedly hadn’t thought much about Guy Pearce in the abstract until recently, and you probably haven’t either. It’s easy to take him for granted. That face has been part of the landscape of the movies—Hollywood cinema and independent cinema and international cinema—for 30 years, since Pearce emerged from the chrysalis of Neighbours (Australia’s longest-running soap opera) as a candy-colored blistering-hot drag queen movie star in 1994’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Minus one brief but significant sabbatical, he’s worked constantly over the ensuing three decades—across television and film, in prosthetics, in 16th-century period pieces, in films set in the Prohibition-era South, in outer space, in Tom Clancy adaptations, in two Best Picture winners, and with constantly migrating accents. He has been a spewer of rage, the picture of composure, a dumper of exposition. He’s played Andy Warhol, Prince Albert, Harry Houdini, and Henry VIII, but he’s not quite a chameleon. He can’t be, with that face. But although he looks enough like a superhero that he was offered Daredevil back in the day, he’d rather play Aldrich Killian, the guy who mutates himself with nanotech to kill Tony Stark. Pearce is something of a mutant strain himself—a twist on an old Hollywood cliché, a character-actor-in-a-movie-star’s-body who has actually carved out a character actor’s career.

“I would never describe Guy as a movie star,” says Kate Winslet, Pearce’s costar in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce and Mare of Easttown, “because he would hate to be described as such himself. He would never want anyone to say, ‘Oh, you've achieved X or Y.’ The word achieve would probably make him feel slightly nauseous. He's not utterly without ego, but he is entirely with exceptional taste and instinct…. He will look at a role and it will be his instinct that guides him. How much will he be pushed? How much of a challenge will that be for him? That's what he looks at and he's so multifaceted that, you know, frankly, he can do anything.”

I started reconsidering Pearce’s capabilities the moment he barges onscreen—Madeira-drunk, red-faced, and indignant—in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which hits theaters this week. In his first two films, Corbet proved himself a prodigy, with Coppola-size ambition to tell big American stories and an eye for grandiose compositions that recalls Luchino Visconti. But his latest—a gorgeous, 215-minute, VistaVision epic about assimilation and the uneasy relationship between art and commerce, and the contempt and avarice of the American gentry class—represents a major step forward. It’s a potentially massive Oscar player, and Pearce’s performance is a big part of why that is. His subtly named mid-Atlantic oligarch Harrison Lee Van Buren is a middlebrow sociopath both envious and resentful of the genius of an artist (Adrien Brody) he’s driven to both possess and destroy. It’s a role that ensures we’ll never take Pearce for granted again, and represents the culmination of 20 years of tireless work for an actor who once walked away from Hollywood’s conventional superstar trajectory in search of a film, and a moment, precisely like this one.

“I need to find real variation in where I go in order to keep things interesting for myself,” Pearce is saying. “There is a part of it that's about my own selfish drive, but it's got to be genuinely connected to reading something and going, ‘I never would have imagined that. That's incredible’…. I was in Neighbours for four years. I played the same thing and it fucking drove me nuts. I don't know how much of it”—his whole contrary career—“was a backlash to that.”

It’s an early-December morning; we’re at a hotel café in the middle of New York’s Dimes Square. Tonight Pearce will be presenting at the Gotham Awards—a show that honors excellence in independent filmmaking, and often serves as an Oscar bellwether—with his friend and occasional collaborator Saorise Ronan. As may end up being the case throughout this awards season, Guy is also up for Best Supporting Actor for his work in The Brutalist, a prize he’ll lose to A Real Pain’s Kieran Culkin. Right now Pearce is wearing a casual cardigan over a T-shirt adorned with the Palestinian flag. His hair is swept to the side and his face is lined with a few days of stubble. We speak for nearly two animated hours; Pearce moves his hands like a conductor the whole time, and I’m not entirely certain he ever blinks or breaks eye contact.

We’re talking about the organizing philosophy that has governed Pearce’s eclectic career, which began when he stepped onstage for the first time as an eight-year-old from Geelong, a suburb of Melbourne, and took flight internationally when he chose to do Priscilla. It was the mid-’90s; AIDS was still an epidemic, homophobia was still rampant. For a Mattel-factory-line-hot Australian soap opera star, playing a drag queen represented a potentially career-killing decision. Pearce recalls an agent cautioning him against taking the job, for that very reason. Instead, in what could be construed as a kind of mission statement for his future trajectory, Guy threw on a dress, and stole the movie.

“I think part of what it was for Guy, it was a chance to shed that skin,” Priscilla director Stephan Elliott says in Between a Frock and a Hard Place, a retrospective documentary about the film.“He knew that he would absolutely take Mike from Neighbours out and kill him.”

I first saw Pearce the way I’d imagine most American boys discovered him in 1997, in his first US film, as Detective Edward Exley in Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential. Pearce plays a familiar ingénue role, the idealist audience surrogate who loses his innocence—in this case, during a journey through the seedy underbelly of 1950s Hollywood. It was a formative experience for Pearce; working and learning under the late master Hanson and alongside Russell Crowe, he says, was like “film school.” At the time, Crowe was both a peer and a potential role model, a fellow Australasian talent blowing up on his own terms, making fascinating decisions, vacillating wildly in tone and style from part to part; he’d soon go on to earn three consecutive Oscar nominations and one win, for 2000’s Gladiator.

That same year, Pearce played the lead in Memento, the elegant puzzle-box film that put writer-director Christopher Nolan on the map. It was another formative experience—an opportunity to work alongside a genius just getting on his feet while finding his voice in an independent, microbudget ($9 million) film. More important, it helped Pearce develop a taste for the good shit; “I was completely intimidated, completely inspired, completely enamored,” he told an interviewer a few years back, when the film turned 20. In Memento, as in L.A. Confidential, Pearce shades what could have been a golden-retriever heroic character with a sneering arrogance. Detective Exley and Leonard, Memento’s tattooed protagonist, are egotistical, morally gray assholes whose loyalties, motivations, and beliefs are never clear. It would be a crucial distinction for the actor and the persona that would subsequently define his onscreen presence.

But Hollywood sees what it wants to see; Pearce looked like a bankable blockbuster idol, and found himself slotted, by 2002, into back-to-back adaptations of middle-school classics The Count of Monte Cristo (in which Pearce did get to the bad guy, Fernand Mondego) and The Time Machine, a big-budget family popcorn flick, which despite making money internationally, was widely seen as the John Carter of Mars of its day. “Pearce, as the hero, makes the mistake of trying to give a good and realistic performance,” wrote Roger Ebert, in a scathing pan that accidentally nails the reason traditional leading-man parts weren’t Pearce’s destiny. “[Jeremy] Irons at least knows what kind of movie he’s in, and hams it up accordingly. Pearce seems thoughtful, introspective, quiet, morose.” Viewed in light of what he’d do next, it’s clearly a movie that robs Pearce of all the weapons that make him compelling as an actor, but it helped him discover what he didn’t want to experience again on a project.

“I think the process of it felt way too big for me. I can't make [sense of] this idea of studio films where you just get told what to do by people afraid to lose their jobs,” Pearce says. “I remember there were discussions at the beginning about how I was going to look. A couple of the executives say, ‘No, he'll just cut his hair and he'll just do this and he'll do that.’ And I'm in the room going, Hello? I'm immediately feeling like my intuition doesn't mean anything here. That's a killer for me.” Like Justin Theroux in Mulholland Drive, Pearce felt himself grappling helplessly and frustratedly with Hollywood’s invisible galactic forces. “It was the first time I really felt that there was not just a disconnect, but a kind of greater power up there that you couldn't even really talk to,” Pearce says. The only solution was to step away and regroup.

In 1999 he’d shot Memento, which came out in 2000. In 2000 and 2001 he shot Monte Cristo, went from there to the 100-day shoot of Time Machine, and when that was over he went back and reshot the ending of Monte Cristo. After that he went home to Australia, did a play, and took two years off. It would end up being the longest hiatus of his career. To put this in perspective, here are some hard numbers: Pearce currently has 93 credits on his iMDB page—with five more pending—accrued over a 35-year period. These individual credits include several multi-episode miniseries and multiseason shows like his 476 episodes of Neighbours, which he started on a few days out of high school, and three seasons as the star of the Aussie detective show Jack Irish. It’s a level of productivity that puts him on pace with genius workhorses like Michael Caine (177 credits in 78 years). His peer Russell Crowe sits at 71 (proper) credits over 37 years. Work is and has been a constant in his life, which explains why he’s insistent on doing it on his own terms.

In 2022 it was announced that the 38th season of Neighbours would be its last. A number of stars who’d gotten their start on the show made cameos in the finale. Kylie Minogue made a brief, nonspeaking appearance; Margot Robbie taped a farewell on her phone. Pearce, on the other hand, returned for a full-blown three-episode arc. (The show was later revived by Amazon, and its 41st season is currently streaming; Pearce has made occasional appearances in the new episodes.) It’s a gesture that speaks volumes, not only about Pearce’s love and appreciation for his homeland fan base but also about the Fuck it, this sounds fun and cool and I don’t care what anyone thinks or says about it mentality that’s always characterized the actor’s career choices.

John Hillcoat, who’s made three films with Pearce and has spent most of his career considering the nature of the Australian character, put it in broader, more poetic terms. “Australia is a remote colony…and being a colony we have this antiauthoritarian attitude and we’re quite irreverent. It’s an extreme place. We have a kind of not-giving-a-fuck to us, not playing by the rules, not doing what’s expected. And we share that isolation and that attitude, and maybe that’s why they say Australians are like elephants. We all come home to die.”

When Pearce came home from his first stint in Hollywood, what died was the American studio system’s idea of Guy Pearce—as seen on Warner Bros.’ golden-hued Time Machine poster, with Pearce as an intrepid, airbrushed matinee-idol adventurer. He spends most of 2004’s The Proposition—a harsh Outback Western with a script cowritten by postpunk legend Nick Cave—covered in blood and grime. It was his first collaboration with Hillcoat, with whom he’d do some of his most boundary-pushing work.

“I think it was clearer to him that I'm a versatile actor,” Pearce says of Hillcoat. “I'm interested in all walks of life, and I just want to explore all walks of life…. I had to really dig in deep with John, do lots of research with him, and create a bit of a character for myself, try to find how vulnerable and who this person was.”

Hillcoat had seen Pearce in L.A. Confidential a few years earlier, and immediately recognized how difficult and delicate the role of Ed Exley was. The slipperiness Pearce displayed in the part—while still keeping the audience on his side—made him the director’s first and only choice for Charlie Burns, the protagonist of that dark, violent, and challenging film he and Cave had envisioned. It took five years to get him; Hillcoat says Pearce was worth the wait, and that although it was his name that got the film made, Pearce came in with no pretensions, fully investing himself in a project as grueling as it was commercially risky. “The [principal photography] date slid into the summer,” Hillcoat says, “and it’s dangerous to be working in the outback at that time. It was crazy, it can get up to 45 Celsius”—113 degrees Fahrenheit—“and even beyond that.”

Hillcoat remembers being blown away by Pearce’s obsessiveness, how he excavated the character through historical research and hours of conversation and debate, creating from the outside in, and inside out, dialing in everything from the character’s motivation to his degree of tooth decay. “The teeth, his hair, the level of grubbiness was so important. It was very dry and hot, there was no running water in this area, at this moment in history, so the exact level of grime was a big deal.” But so was the inner journey of the character, a late-19th-century gangster who agrees to find and kill his older brother (Danny Huston, as an even-more-deranged desert outlaw known as Dog Man) to save his younger brother’s life. For Pearce, Hillcoat says, “it was as much about what happens off-screen as what happens onscreen.”

The Australian reviews were mixed; the film’s global box-office take topped out at $5 million. But American critics loved it, and Pearce had found a new gear. It was the first of three films he’d make with Hillcoat, Cave, and Cave’s Bad Seeds partner Warren Ellis, and it set the tone for the kind of intimate, collaborative process Pearce would seek out in the pictures he’d make going forward.

“I remember seeing The Proposition with my agent Chris [Andrews, of CAA] at the Toronto Film Festival in 2005. And when we came out of the screening, Chris said to me, Okay, I now get what it is you're trying to do. And that was a real important moment for me…to have him understand the career that I'm trying to create.”

That career had no locus except extreme and constant deviation—but when you step back and look at Pearce’s choices, even the most bizarre ones, a kind of logic becomes discernible. Pearce took central roles in interesting and challenging small films and challenging and interesting supporting roles in big-budget studio films. Some of those films won awards, some are forgotten gems, and some are mediocre, or boring, or bad. But in each role, no matter how small, you can see what hooked Pearce, whether it’s the material, the costars, or the eye behind the camera.

“Starting with Priscilla, he's coming from a pretty eccentric place,” says Andrew Bujalski. “He had already kind of been through the Hollywood machine, and they tried to nudge him into the conventional leading man thing with Time Machine, and I think he knew pretty quickly that wasn't really his taste or where he felt like it could be most effective, and I’d guess that’s how he ends up at breakfast with me.”

That breakfast meeting led to Pearce and Bujalski working together on Results, a romantic comedy with Pearce as Trevor, a ripped gym owner who lives a life dictated by discipline and communicates in wellness-speak mantras seemingly torn from The Secret. Bujalski says he based the character on his interactions with Pearce. “He’s a kind of indefatigable optimist, and to me that's ground for comedy and drama, because I’ve found indefatigable optimists tend to be deeper than they may seem. That optimism has been forged in fire. You don't get there unless you've been through the darkness and then decided to work against it.”

Bujalski even made Trevor Australian, thinking it would make the role easier—although the opposite turned out to be true. “He went and picked out the region of Australia his character would be from,” the director says, “and really committed to an accent, even though my untrained ear couldn’t pick up the difference. There's something charming about that, and something about that willfulness that fit with the character, as well.”

I get a taste of Pearce’s attention to detail during our interview; in the course of two hours, as if staging our chat for an unseen camera, he moves us from a standing table to a booth to get more comfortable, then back to the standing table when our section starts filling up. In Bujalski, Pearce found a director who was open to pausing between takes to debate everything from character motivation to the blocking of a given scene.

“He would do it the way that I was suggesting, but he’d tell me every fiber of his being [was] telling him not to,” Bujalski recalls. “And then I thought, Okay, well, that's a lot of fibers. Let's talk about this.” The director was used to intimate shoots with loose scripts, and Pearce, the biggest star he’d ever worked with, was immediately at home in that world—not as a pain in the ass but as a true additive presence.

“When you’re collaborating with somebody who is as committed to the storytelling as you are,” Bujalski says, “who can explain and defend the feelings and opinions they’re contributing, you're only gonna get good results from those conversations.”

The Brutalist was shot in 34 days, at a cost of less than $10 million. Brady Corbet describes the shoot romantically, like a student film—just him, his partner and cowriter Mona Fastvold, and a small crew, fighting the elements, fighting the constraints of the budget, fighting illness, trying to “capture sunlight in a box.” It was hardly a sure thing on paper—an independent third film from a young, noncommercial director grappling with big themes and a powerful story that is sure to spark controversy. They were in a constant state of building the boat in the middle of the ocean, chasing the light at locations they had access to for only a few hours; Corbet says Pearce was a rock throughout, and Corbet credits the actor’s preparation (a common refrain from everyone I spoke to for this story), skill, and professionalism for getting them through the process.

“When it comes to how he handles an immense amount of text, he's an assassin. He doesn't miss a syllable,” Corbet says. “I honestly don't think I would've been able to keep schedule if it weren't for him delivering immediately on take one. And I stress that it's hard to do. It's hard to do justice to how incredibly stressful these situations are.”

Corbet thought Pearce would be right for Van Buren after seeing him flex his knack for dialect as the Depression-era fuckboi who takes Winslet for a ride in Mildred Pierce. He sees the character as an archetype—an institutional antagonist of immense means and power common in mid-20th-century class melodramas. The film’s central tension is an eternal one—the battle of wills between a money guy and an artist. Van Buren uses his wealth and influence to dangle the quintessentially American promise of a better life in front of László Toth, a Hungarian architect and Buchenwald survivor (played, with what Pearce describes as “incredible, confident stillness,” by mortal-lock Oscar frontrunner Adrien Brody) in exchange for his genius. Van Buren uses Toth’s desire for autonomy and comfort as a means of control, perverting his artistic vision to build a monument to himself.

Corbet freely admits that in creating the character, he drew on adverse experiences he’s had with certain cynical, malevolent financiers and executives. “On previous projects of mine, I've worked with a lot of people that have very different ethics and morals than I do,” he says. “And that's a very complicated dynamic. I was interested in the idea that there are so many patrons that are not just interested in collecting the artist’s work. They're interested in collecting the artist.” Which means that in playing Van Buren, Pearce is—essentially, ironically—playing an avatar of the dark side of the Hollywood system he’s been working for two decades to stay away from.

For his part, Pearce sees Van Buren as a kind of Salieri figure. “There's a certain envy to him,” Pearce says. “He’s someone who can recognize greatness, but doesn't actually have it and is determined to do everything he can to feel like he’s swimming amongst greatness, whether that's just possessing things or dominating people or charming a room or disarming people you know, but it's all a little unhinged.” It’s a role that makes use of Pearce’s entire skill set—the arrogance of an Ed Exley, bolstered by the gravitas that comes with time served, plus his own unique craft cocktail of magnetism and nasty weirdness.

For Pearce, a performance often starts with the voice, and while he’s wary of one-to-one references—he doesn’t want audiences to feel like they’re watching someone do an impression—he says he modeled Van Buren’s delivery on his friend and Proposition costar Danny Huston, of the Hollywood-royal Hustons. Pearce turns that into a kind of performative, boarding-school theatricality, undercut by the insecurity of a working-class bastard who mistakes flipping through a thesaurus with being well read.

Van Buren always looks straight out of some sinister version of a Rockwell oil painting—clipped mustache, fresh shave, perfectly coiffed side part. The Brutalist is, among many other things, a parade of incredible fits, and Pearce’s look is no exception; the tailoring is immaculate. In his contrived dignity—and the volcanic anger that erupts from a place of fear and insecurity whenever he doesn’t have complete control of any room he’s in—Van Buren basically is the American establishment.

Felicity Jones, who plays Toth’s wife and shares several key scenes with Pearce’s character, appreciated the levity Pearce brought to the role, which she saw as potentially heavy and dour on the page, and marvels at the absurdity he found in the character. “There was a laughter in Guy’s performance that I thought was really interesting,” she says.

Pearce is thrilled with the film Corbet produced, and the love it’s receiving. “There were times I’d feel uncomfortable in how [Corbet] was shooting something, but I’d be loving the fact that he's unconventional. You see this happen from time to time with certain filmmakers, when it all comes together, the mature statement.”

But in conversation he seems just as, if not more, rewarded by the experience making the film itself, and what it represents. “Brady's realization of character and the very in-depth nature of psychology and behavior and interaction between people, that's the stuff I'm always looking for,” Pearce says. “I care about the interaction between people and how precarious and how loving, and how violent. What goes on between two people to me is ultimately the reason why I'm interested in doing what I'm doing, and that's why it's a great honor to be part of this film.”

Like The Proposition before it, The Brutalist explains and recontextualizes the last 20 years of Pearce’s career. It’s a film shot on a tightrope that demanded everything he has; it could go down as a first-graf-in-the-obituary role, particularly if the awards buzz around the film, and Pearce’s performance in it, leads to something tangible.

When I asked Pearce about his Oscar chances, he began by responding with the usual deferential platitudes—“It's funny, isn't it? The nomination thing? Because on one hand, we're not in a race, so it's not a competition. It's art”—before acknowledging the basic human desire to be recognized, to win a fucking Oscar: “I was pretty excited,” he admitted, “to win that Emmy when I won it for Mildred Pierce.”

“I can't think about the nomination thing, to be honest,” he continues, “because I just feel like it's a fool's game. I think ultimately [I] judge an actor by the longevity of someone's career and whether I'm impressed by somebody. The Philip Seymours and the Edward Nortons and the Gary Oldmans and the Al Pacinos, the Marlon Brandos—I don't care whether they won any awards, because they fucking stole my heart.”

As for the idea that some awards—like certain jobs—are worth chasing because of the opportunities they open up? Pearce understands the argument, but his instincts have gotten him this far, and he’s not about to start second-guessing them now.

“The thing you’re supposed to want is to be a big American movie star, which I absolutely see all the benefits of,” he says. “People would say, ‘Yeah, but if you do this thing, then you can choose whatever you want.’ I'm like, I'm already choosing whatever I want.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Andy Jackson
Grooming by Melissa DeZarate at A-Frame Agency