Guy Pearce names the worst period of his career: “I did a bunch of shit”
Even though he’s been working solidly for over 30 years and has pulled his weight in plenty of phenomenal movies, it’s not an uncommon belief that Guy Pearce could – and maybe should – have ended up as a much bigger star than the one he became.
It certainly looked as though things were heading that way in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the Antipodean actor following the path trodden by so many of his contemporaries and countryfolk by kicking off his career in Neighbours and Home and Away before making the jump to America.
Instant cult classic The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert gained him international attention, and he appeared destined for the top after a compelling performance in Curtis Hanson’s ‘Best Picture’ nominee LA Confidential and Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending Memento, which is when things first started to go off the rails.
By his own admission, Pearce sought to actively attain stardom, which didn’t work out too well when he decided 2002’s The Time Machine was the ideal place to make his debut as a blockbuster leading man. Although there have been flickers of greatness and sporadic successes along the way in the likes of ‘Best Picture’ winners The Hurt Locker and The King’s Speech and the odd franchise gig, his early momentum was never truly recaptured.
Over the last decade, Pearce carved out an unusual sideline by alternating his more acclaimed fare with a string of shitty genre flicks that, more often than not, never saw the inside of a theatre. Between 2016 and 2021, he racked up 16 credits, including a slew of nonsensical thrillers along The Spinning Man, Brian De Palma’s Domino, Disturbing the Peace, The Seventh Day, and Zone 414.
As it turns out, he had a very good reason for placing quantity over quality. “I did a bunch of shit during my divorce because I needed the money,” he confessed to The Times. “It was my divorce period: ’16, ’17, ’18. I’d read scripts thinking, ‘No, this is pretty good actually, I could do this’. But a year earlier, I would have said no. You’re forced to expand your tolerance of things when you need dough, so it was a real relief once I paid off my divorce.”
After separating from Kate Mestitz, his wife of almost 20 years, it may not be a coincidence that Pearce recently notched the first Academy Award nomination of his career when his turn in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist got him on the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ shortlist.
Would he have been in a position to accept an offer to appear in a relatively inexpensive and comparatively low-paying production that runs for over three hours if he was still trying to do nothing but earn as much money as possible? From the way he tells it, probably not.
