By Erin Free
Australian soap operas have thrown up a host of exciting actors, with everyone from Russell Crowe to Rose Byrne getting their start on high turnover TV drama. Few of the best, however, were ever actually legitimate stars of the genre, appearing either as guests, in supporting roles, or on shows that never really caught fire. The major exception is Guy Pearce, who has successfully navigated away from his beginnings as a heartthrob on Neighbours to now stand as one of the most consistently interesting actors on the international scene. Though he has a whole host of fascinating performances, characters, and films to his name (The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, L.A Confidential, The Hard Word, Animal Kingdom, Memento, The King’s Speech), one of Pearce’s most compelling creations is outback outlaw, Charlie Burns, in 2005’s The Proposition, the towering “kangaroo western” written by rock icon and occasional scribe, Nick Cave, and directed by the gifted John Hillcoat (Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead).
After a frenzied shootout, Charlie and his younger brother, Mikey (Richard Wilson), are hauled in by the ruthless Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), who fronts Charlie with a damning proposition. To guarantee the safety of the naive Mikey, Charlie has to track down his older brother, Arthur (Danny Huston), a bullying psycho on the run from the law after the evisceration of a homesteading family. As Charlie rides into the burning desert in pursuit, he hurls headlong into his own moral abyss. Though the most grounded and least verbal of all the film’s characters (“I always prefer playing something than saying something,” Pearce told FilmInk in 2005. “But you realise how much of the character you begin to understand through the dialogue when you have a character that doesn’t say anything”), Pearce’s Charlie Burns is endlessly fascinating, as his inner moral battle drives the brutal and uncompromising narrative forward.
To Pearce, the character presented himself as a mystery that needed to be solved. “The more that I looked at it, the less that I knew about this character of Charlie,” the actor told FilmInk. “I was really looking for answers, and on some levels, Charlie is not even a character in the film to me. He’s like the magic carpet that the audience gets on board, and in some ways, he’s the eyes through which the audience sees the film. I’m sure that every actor would say that about their own character! But John Hillcoat told me that Charlie is there to be faced with this incredible dilemma, and on some level, the less that we see or know about him, the more that is left up to the audience’s imagination. That doesn’t necessarily help me as an actor playing it, because I’ve got to find out who this person is. But I eventually came to realise that in finding a character, you’re finding out how the character fits into the world of the film. The more that I understood that, the more that I saw the purpose of Charlie. I was very much one of the pieces in this great big puzzle rather than it being about him, even though he is the one being offered up this proposition. With Charlie, a lot of his decisions are made off screen; you don’t even see him agree to head out for his brother. Charlie Burns is a very interesting character to play.”
Triple 9 is released in cinemas on February 25.
