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“I’ve had a number of people say to me, ‘Oh my God, you’re back!’” Guy Pearce says of the last few very busy months of his life. “And of course my first response is, ‘Well, I didn’t ever go anywhere.’”
What the Australian star has realized since his new film The Brutalist premiered at the Venice Film Festival last August, though, is that “this job is two jobs: the job of making the film, and the job of promoting the film.” And that second gig is what he’s now pursuing more intensely than he has in years — perhaps since his breakout roles in L.A. Confidential and Memento around the turn of the century.
Playing the wealthy, mercurial and quite possibly sinister industrialist Harrison van Buren in Brady Corbet’s film, Pearce has earned Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award nominations and could score his first Oscar nomination. It’s not anything he could have anticipated when making The Brutalist in Hungary, whose epic scale belies its remarkably low budget.
“The less money there is, the more creative you get to be,” Pearce, 57, tells me on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast. “People are forced to think a little bit harder and try a little bit harder. It’s an odd sort of situation where art and commerce are banging up against each other.” That friction is a core theme of The Brutalist, which tells the story of an architect (Adrien Brody) who flees the Holocaust and finds the opportunity to build a massive project — but only thanks to the whims of Pearce’s millionaire character.
This episode of podcast also includes my post-Golden Globes wrap-up with Vanity Fair’s David Canfield. And you’ll be hearing even more from me on your headphones this week: Tomorrow brings a special bonus pod, featuring my conversation in front of a live L.A. audience with the director of Inside Out 2, Kelsey Mann. And I’ll have another bonus episode Saturday, the day before Oscar nominations voting ends. Welcome to the awards swirl!
