Guy Pearce walked to his recent press day in Los Angeles. The hotel where the interviews were taking place was just a few blocks from the L.A. condo he bought around the time he was shooting “Memento” in 1999 and has held onto ever since. He would walk back home at the end of the day.
There is something candid and unpretentious about Pearce, including how he talks about his profession.
“I suppose on some level I’m interested in demystifying it a little bit,” Pearce, 57, said over coffee in a corner table of the hotel’s restaurant, with a hillside view of the city unfurling behind him. “It’s a funny life because it’s always sort of being assessed in a way, and we’re all assessing it together. You are asking me questions about me, I’m sort of trying to analyze myself and it’s out there in the public.
“I’m trying to always be easier on myself as time goes on,” he adds. “I’ve had darker, more troubled times and been grumpy at lots of things in the past, but I feel life’s pretty good these days.”
In between his two walks, Pearce would mostly be talking about his new movie “The Brutalist,” which has earned rave reviews and rapturous responses ever since it premiered without a distributor at the Venice Film Festival. Picked up by upstart awards powerhouse A24, the film has generated a lot of attention in advance of its limited release on Friday, with special 70mm engagements already happening.
Pearce is the kind of hiding-in-plain-sight character actor that can be all too easy to overlook. Having begun as a child performer in Australia, he launched to stardom there while still a teenager on the TV soap opera “Neighbours” (which also gave a start to the likes of Kylie Minogue, Margot Robbie and Russell Crowe). His turns in films such as “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” “L.A. Confidential” and “Memento” soon made him familiar to American audiences as well.
He would go on to a diverse slate of work: appearances in Oscar winners such as “The Hurt Locker” and “The King’s Speech”; a villain in the big-budget superhero adventure “Iron Man 3”; an Emmy for his playboy opposite Kate Winslet in the miniseries “Mildred Pierce.”
“He doesn’t do anything by half,” Winslet tells The Times via email. “He’s utterly committed. He’s completely supportive of every other cast member. And he doesn’t make any fuss. He just quietly gets on with the job and then destroys everyone with his killer performances every single time.”
But if Pearce can be seen as something of a humble craftsman, his work in “The Brutalist” may be his masterpiece, in that it pulls together strands from throughout his career. As the film’s wealthy Pennsylvania industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, Pearce creates a psychologically penetrating portrait of a man who is by turns generous and predatory, inquisitive and closed off, someone who ultimately reveals himself to be capable of true evil. (The performance has already earned Pearce nominations from multiple awards-granting groups.)
Set in post-WWII America, “The Brutalist” sees Van Buren hiring immigrant architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) to build a monumental institute — a massive structure including a chapel — as a tribute to his late mother. As the project drags on over years, Van Buren’s patronage becomes a form of exploitation as he takes more and more from Tóth.
If there is something that connects many of Pearce’s best roles, it is an ability to play people who don’t quite understand themselves, characters in which there is a distance between how they present themselves and who they really are.
“Most of the time we do it without even realizing,” says Pearce, sitting upright as he seems to engage deeply with the connection between his characters and reality. “We try to be smarter than we are. We try to be funnier than we are. We try to be more confident than we are. But all these things are slightly different to how we are when we’re sitting at home on our own.”
Leaning into the idea, he continues, “So that disconnect exists all over the place and to play that stuff — the beauty about film is you can do that.”
Shot in the rarely-used widescreen format of VistaVision, “The Brutalist,” a labor of love for its director-co-writer Brady Corbet, was made for a reported $10 million on a production schedule of just 33 days, which, given the scope and scale of the movie, makes its sense of ambition and sprawl seem inconceivable.
“We hear this a bit and I’m trying to make sense of that because it didn’t feel like we were rushed,” says Pearce. “I’m sure if you ask Brady, he might say, ‘Yes, I was under the pump,’ but it didn’t feel to me like we were struggling. Brady, there’s a certain energy he carries, but he’s very relaxed on set. It doesn’t feel like there’s real pressure.”
Pearce likens his response to reading the script to when he first read Christopher Nolan’s “Memento,” recognizing that this relatively obscure filmmaker was about to make the leap to something truly great. After watching Corbet’s previous indies “The Childhood of a Leader” and “Vox Lux,” Pearce remembers asking himself, “This guy, what’s his style? It’s like nothing else. It’s really unusual and unnerving. And I was just really taken by him. … His script is stunning. And this role is so complex and there’s a lot going on here and great stuff for me as an actor to really kind of savor and get into. So it was an exciting prospect.
“It’s also really emotional, and to me that’s the No. 1 thing,” Pearce says. “It’s amazing to watch great, clever films, but if you feel a bit cold, then you feel a bit cold. Whereas I feel like this, it just tears your heart out and it’s sort of like America sitting there in your face.”
Corbet, 36, speaking from New York on Zoom, describes the character of Van Buren as a “capital-A antagonist,” noting that it was “Mildred Pierce” that made him think of casting Pearce for a role that needed to evoke a bygone era of stalwart actors such as James Mason and Joseph Cotton.
“He has the self-possession of a man in his 50s, but he has the virility and charisma of a younger man,” Corbet says of Pearce. “When we were first talking with hair and makeup, there was an initial instinct to age him up a little bit. And I was like, you know, I think it’s actually the opposite. I think that [Van Buren] should be healthy, he should be tan and rich. I think that he should represent a very successful vision of the American dream and American promise.”
The character is based partly on Albert C. Barnes, the Pennsylvania chemist turned businessman and art collector, and also drawn from Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefeller family. But Pearce did not immerse himself in historical research for the part, feeling that he already had everything he needed.
“It was pretty clear to me in the script who this guy was as far as his personality and his energy,” says Pearce. “I’m sure that Brady will have done a whole lot of homework on the Rockefellers and Barnes and all different kinds of people. And he probably mentioned some of those people to me, but I certainly didn’t feel like I even needed to go and investigate those people to understand. I just read it and I could have started the next day, to be honest.”
More than once in the film Van Buren declares a conversation to be “intellectually stimulating,” a signal that he perhaps doesn’t totally understand what is being said but is sharp enough to know that he should. For Pearce that sense of yearning insecurity was a familiar one, which he compares to the character of Salieri in “Amadeus,” being talented enough only to recognize true genius.
“I think I have the same quality myself personally,” admits Pearce, modestly. “I look at other great actors, primarily, but I look at other great artists and musicians and I can spot it a mile away. And I’m so envious that I don’t have what they have.”
“That’s the thing that’s so great about Guy is he doesn’t overplay those beats,” says Corbet. “It really could have been played in a major as opposed to a minor key. He just had really great instincts and it’s very much what I imagined, but I didn’t really have to coax it out of him.”
With the film’s central relationship increasingly developing into one of psychological torment, Van Buren commits an appalling act of violence against Tóth that won’t be spoiled here. Though there are hints to his behavior throughout the film, the rupture of Van Buren’s actions troubled Pearce.
“Every time I talked to Brady, I had to kind of go, ‘So I just want to talk about that scene again,’” Pearce recalls. “Because it comes out of the blue, it’s particularly disturbing. There’s a whole lot about it that is completely shocking. It’s such an indictment on the lengths that we’ll go to as human beings to keep our heads above water, to feel that we have power in ourselves.”
Corbet likens the moment to Albert Camus’ novel “The Stranger” when a character explains all the factors that went into the moment when he killed someone in cold blood. Or, as John Huston’s rapacious tycoon Noah Cross says in “Chinatown,” “Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.”
The mercurial nature of Van Buren often demanded Pearce to convey multiple emotions at once. Corbet recalled shooting the scene where Van Buren leads a group of party guests outside to a hillside overlook that would become the location for his institute and delivers a long speech that is somehow both self-pitying and self-aggrandizing. He introduces the plan and fully ensnares Tóth into the project.
Corbet and his cinematographer Lol Crawley wanted to shoot the scene during early twilight, just as the last moments of daylight were fading away. Complications caused the production to run behind and lose 10 minutes off a planned 30 minutes to capture the moment. The pressure was on for Pearce to effortlessly deliver pages of dialogue before the dramatic effect of the light was gone.
“If Guy had been less prepared, we just never would’ve gotten it,” remembers Corbet. “And I don’t know what the solution would’ve been then. I don’t know if we would’ve been able to reshoot it or if we would’ve had to reconceive that scene. But fortunately because of Guy’s professionalism, I was not obliged to compromise my conception of the sequence.”
Pearce would likely push away such compliments. Throughout his career he has worked to maintain a comfortable remove from the machinery of stardom and Hollywood.
“I wanted to handle Hollywood the way I wanted to handle it,” he says. “A lot of people would say I messed up my career because I didn’t go and do big superhero movies like I should have, but I didn’t want to. If I got offered a good job in America, great, I’d do it. And if I wasn’t getting work in America, I’d just be at home [in Australia] and find work at home.”
Pearce recently sold the house in Melbourne he had for nearly 30 years to more fully relocate to the Netherlands to be closer to his son, born in 2016 with Dutch actor Carice van Houten. Anyone who saw Pearce — who has released two albums of original music — on pandemic-era Zoom interviews in a home-recording studio enviably full of guitars and keyboards, that was in the Melbourne house he gave up.
“I’m on some level setting up a new life in Holland,” says Pearce with a sense of gentle wonder. “We’re looking after our little boy and doing the best we can as parents.”
Pearce took an extended period away from acting around 2002 and 2003. He recalled how once during a series of five-minute junket interviews, one journalist compared being an actor to being a liar and it sent Pearce into an existential tailspin. And it grew to become a question he had to answer for himself.
“It forced me to actually go: What is the value of acting? And to just step back and come up with some answers for myself about its validity,” says Pearce. “To just conflate the two and kind of go, ‘You are an actor, therefore you’re a liar,’ it’s just daft. So I’d like to go back to that person who asked me that question and go, I’ve got an answer for you, finally.”
Wherever that unknown journalist may be, Guy Pearce would like a word. And with “The Brutalist,” which has already brought him more acclaim than any role in years, playing a man struggling to confront the truth about himself may be answer enough.