With award-winning The Brutalist, actor Guy Pearce, 57, makes his Hollywood return

NEW YORK – 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.

He 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 (1997) and Memento (2000). But the actor found lumbering studio blockbusters such as The Time Machine (2002) 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 Oscar-winning pictures like The King’s Speech (2010) and The Hurt Locker (2009), while supporting British actress Kate Winslet in two HBO shows, Mildred Pierce (2011) and Mare Of Easttown (2021).

But his lower profile is about to get a major jolt, thanks to the new film The Brutalist, which has earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

In the 3½-hour period drama directed by American film-maker Brady Corbet, Pearce plays the moneyed Pennsylvania industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, who takes on the immigrant architect Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) as his new pet project.

Van Buren is impressed by Toth’s talent and commissions him to design a community centre 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 Toth and the audience on their toes.

The Brutalist, which opens in Singapore cinemas on Feb 20, has earned 10 nominations at the upcoming Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Brody and Best Supporting Actress for Felicity Jones.

Though he now lives primarily in the Netherlands to be closer to the eight-year-old son he shares with Dutch 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 LA,” he said.

Here are edited excerpts from the interview.

You never had much use for being famous. Was that easier because you had already experienced a level of fame on the long-running Australian soap Neighbours in the 1980s and didn’t love it?

Exactly. I really struggled with the fame side of it. I understood why (American actors) Cary Grant or (Marlon) Brando were 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 counter-intuitive to me.

Now, I’m a lot better at actually going, “Okay, I understand that a certain amount of fame helps you get more work.” But as far as my natural creative instincts, 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 Toth: “I find our conversations intellectually stimulating.”

I’ve seen the film three times and there’re quite a few laughs with my character. Laughs are an interesting thing in film because often, they can come from pure comedy or something uncomfortable. But I actually feel like if a character is particularly earnest in his 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 is sort of ridiculous in a way.

You are noted for your healthy scepticism towards Hollywood.

To be honest, I’m an old white guy and I’m talking about how things were in the 1990s and 2000s. I suppose that I don’t fully know how it works these days. I’m back here in LA 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?”

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 film-making.” 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 go to see Christopher Nolan movies in the best possible format, so 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.

To go to something like The Brutalist is to essentially surrender your phone for 3½ hours.

But I do think we are 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.”

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 film-making.

To be part of those two worlds that were only three years apart was pretty cool. 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. NYTIMES

The Brutalist opens in Singapore cinemas on Feb 20.