The three movies Guy Pearce hates the most: “There are different things I dislike about different films”
Guy Pearce is an actor of unflinching honesty, often to a fault.
Those who managed to catch Guy Pearce in LA Confidential and Memento may have suspected that he would instantly become one of the biggest actors in the world, with his incredible range, but his Australian popularity did not translate to international stardom due to disputes with powerful members of the industry.
Pearce was blocked from appearing in future Christopher Nolan films after Memento due to a nasty grudge held by an executive of Warner Bros, and he risked his career when calling out Kevin Spacey’s abusive behaviour on the set of LA Confidential. While some may cite his political outspokenness as the reason he has struggled to find work, it may also be because the actor has been completely genuine when describing films that he appeared in that simply didn’t work.
Although he started more diplomatically, saying, “there are different things I dislike about different films”, he was quick to call out the biopic My Forgotten Man as one of his films that he hated the most, which starred Pearce as the famous The Adventures of Robin Hood star Errol Flynn, and was released in Australia as Flynn after debuting under its original title at the Cannes Film Festival.
An early cut of the film had been so disastrous that another three years were spent reshooting it, but Flynn essentially disappeared into obscurity outside of Australia, and while eventually released in 1993, it so blanked out of minds that most Americans had no idea who Pearce was when he popped up in LA Confidential in 1997.
He also disliked Woundlings, a British film that was later retitled Brave New World, because it “has a dislocated, jarring feel about it” that he did not approve of, and thankfully it never received much attention either, because it only ever received a limited release on home media in Australia after making its debut at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival, one of the state’s more obscure festivals.
While working on smaller films that few people will ever have the chance to see was clearly a distressing experience for Pearce, being in something more commercial wasn’t immediately beneficial. He co-starred with Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L Jackson in Rules of Engagement, a military legal thriller directed by Academy Award winner William Friedkin, which is generally considered to be one of Pearce’s weaker films, and the actor seems to agree, as he called it “a monstrous, testosterone-driven, studio-oriented, money-driven project”.
The tragedy is that many of these films were made early on in his career and may have caused him to develop a more cynical perspective on what opportunities could be granted to him. It was for many years that Pearce felt like the one actor who could redeem a film, regardless of its overall quality, such that while reviews may have been mixed for The Count of Monte Cristo, Traitor, Prometheus, and Lawless, critics seemed to agree that he always blew his co-stars out of the water.
Luckily, Pearce finally got his flowers when he earned the first Oscar nomination of his entire career for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in The Brutalist, which will hopefully be the beginning of a more pleasant period in the life of a great actor.
