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After his acclaimed performances in films such as LA Confidential, The Proposition, Memento, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Animal Kingdom and The Hurt Locker, you may be surprised that Guy Pearce has just been nominated for his first ever Oscar: for his turn as the sociopathic industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren in The Brutalist. Or maybe you haven’t noticed Pearce’s Oscars campaign because he keeps rubbishing his own career: he was “shit” in Memento (“I’m bad in a good movie. Fuck!”), worse in Neighbours (“I played the same thing and it fucking drove me nuts”) and has cheerfully owned up to acting in “a bunch of shit during my divorce because I needed the money”.
As awards campaigns go – well, it’s a lot better than Karla Sofía Gascón’s. Not that Pearce has paid attention. “One of the [Emilia Pérez] actors said something on social media, right?” he says, in the understatement of the century.
Though The Brutalist is at the front of everyone’s minds, Pearce is promoting a completely different film: Inside, in which he plays a downtrodden prisoner who tries to convince a younger inmate to kill his notorious cellmate.
But what is it like now being “Academy award nominee” Guy Pearce? “It’s funny,” he says, rubbing that square jaw that suits both rich American industrialists and rough Australian inmates. “Not funny that I haven’t had one before – just funny to even get one, I reckon. I stop and go, ‘Wow, is that – really? OK? That’s really happened?’”
Pearce is supremely unbothered by the fuss. “I’ve been nominated for a few of these awards, and I haven’t won any!” he laughs. “I’m not gonna win! Kieran [Culkin] will win, again.” Has he got a speech ready? “I’ve had one I’ve thought about for the last three months now – haven’t used it once! Nah, I’ll just forget it.”
Pearce has a reputation as one of the more down-to-earth actors in the business: years of living in LA and now Amsterdam has not softened the Aussie contempt for puff and bullshit. He’s sweetly unguarded, which can cause him trouble: two weeks before we speak, he made headlines for telling the Guardian his ex-wife, Kate Mestitz, was the love of his life – and not the Dutch actor Carice van Houten, his partner and mother of his eight-year-old son, Monte. The resulting outrage led Van Houten to issue an affectionate public statement, clarifying she and Pearce actually broke up years ago without anyone knowing.
“Oh God,” Pearce groans, of the headline. “It blew up into this whole thing! Look, let’s face it, I was in love with Kate when I was 12 – she got a pretty good run-up compared to anyone else in my life. So it’s a fair enough thing to say.”
He and Van Houten “never felt the need to say anything” about their separation, “because it’s nobody’s bloody business,” he says. “But Carice was really copping it in Holland. I mean, so was I. But she and I are the best of friends. We live together and look after our boy, and we function like a family. We have a great love, we adore each other. So yes, she probably is the love of my life now.”
Then, a week after we speak, Pearce told an interviewer about how Kevin Spacey “targeted” him on the set of LA Confidential, and how he “sobbed” decades later when the allegations against Spacey began to emerge. (Spacey responded by telling him to “grow up”, to which Pearce declines to comment further.)
In the unsettling Australian prison drama Inside, the feature debut of director Charles Williams, Pearce plays Warren Murfett, a prisoner on the precipice of parole who befriends younger inmate Mel (a remarkable Vincent Miller) and convinces him to kill his notorious cellmate Mark Shepard, who has been imprisoned since he was 13 for mass murder. Played by Shōgun’s Cosmo Jarvis (doing the best Aussie accent by a foreigner since Dev Patel in Lion), Shepard unnerves the other prisoners with his wide-eyed sermons, often breaking out in tongues; killing him, Warren tells Mel, “is the right thing, the best thing” he can do with his life.
Warren cuts an angry, sorrowful figure: he reserves his little enthusiasm for completing the celebrity trivia on the wrappers of sweets that are clearly modelled on Austalia’s Fantales. (Who cares about Oscars – Pearce was once a Fantale entry.) Pearce loved how realised Warren was; he hates turning up on set and feeling like the character is half-baked: “If a director says to me, ‘You can build the character however you want’ – I don’t want to build a character! That always worries me, because I don’t necessarily do my best work when I have to do that. I don’t trust myself.”
Inside was filmed in a real prison facility near Geelong in Australia that hasn’t yet opened. “The staff are all there, the wardens are all there – we had to go through full security checks every time we came in and out every day, but we had the run of the place, which was quite incredible,” Pearce says.
Between scenes, he would walk around the prison, talking to the wardens (“A lot of them have worked in prisons for years. They had stories”) and the extras, many of whom were formerly incarcerated: “I was getting a sense of how prison works – who would be where at what time, how you could move from here to there.”
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Other scenes were filmed in a youth detention centre that was closing down; there were about 10 boys still inside, so Pearce spoke with them. “It was deeply heartbreaking,” he says. “I find it really moving and so sad, particularly with young men. Of course I’m vividly imagining what it would be like if my son were to end up incarcerated, what it must be like for families who have 17-, 18-, 19-year-old boys in prison. Yes, it’s also sad for the 50-year-olds who keep going in and out all their lives – but to look at a young, vulnerable man is pretty devastating.”
Pearce shot Inside after finishing The Brutalist’s 34-day, breakneck shoot. Both films revolve around very ambiguous relationships between men: Van Buren and László Tóth in The Brutalist, Warren and Mel in Inside. The lines are blurred between what is brotherly, paternal, sexual and hostile behaviour; in one scene, Warren directs young Mel in how to kill Shepard during a blowjob – brutal advice, delivered with both friendly and erotic overtones.
Pearce is “deeply interested” in blurred relationships between men. “As I go through life, trying to understand the dynamics between myself and my friends and – not that I really have any enemies, but people who have done wrong by me – what then happens with that relationship?” he says. “I’m really curious about the susceptibility and vulnerability we live with constantly, whether it is with your lover, your son or your brother. If a writer has homed in on that stuff, I’ll go to that every day of the week. But I’ve done some bad films before – I know I can’t sit around waiting for scripts like this to come along. I’d only work really rarely!”
Did he take angry, lonely Warren home with him? “I probably inadvertently did, to a degree,” he says. “But I’m so used to it now, especially compared to how I used to do things. I used to feel like I had to have the character in my head 24/7, because I was fearful of losing them, and that became incredibly exhausting. I’ve slowly realised that it doesn’t necessarily mean I do better work. There are definitely days when I can’t really socialise with everyone, but I’m better at compartmentalising now. I trust I can get back into the character. Thirty years ago, I was pretty stressy about that stuff.”
Pearce is now based in the Netherlands, where he’s “really happy” living with Van Houten (they met on set of the 2016 western Brimstone) and their son, Monte. “The pair of us are doing our best as a parenting team,” he says. “But it means that I’m missing out on my life in Australia.”
Ahead of the Oscars next week, he is trying to watch all the major nominees: “Not to blame my son, but I don’t think I’ve watched anything but Bluey and Harry Potter in eight years.” His co-star Adrien Brody is his call for best actor (“I just love him so much”) but he thought Timothée Chalamet was “stunning” as Bob Dylan, and Sebastian Stan “really incredible” as Donald Trump.
Years ago, when Pearce was nominated for every TV award going for Mildred Pierce, he found himself in a sort of support group for supporting actors: “It was me, Paul Giamatti, James Woods and Peter Dinklage. But we all got one each! I got the Emmy, someone got the Golden Globe, someone got the SAG award. We’d see each other and go, ‘Yay, you got one! Well done!’”
This year, Culkin seems to be taking home all the loot – but Pearce is untroubled by that. He talks about his recent trip home for the Aacta awards (“divine”), when he ran into the singer Robbie Williams, nominated for his biopic Better Man: “I said, ‘Hey, another award show!’ and he went, ‘But have either of us won anything? No!’ So we had a good old laugh – then of course he bloody won!”
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Inside is out in Australian cinemas on 27 February, with UK and US releases yet to be announced
