by Gill Pringle in Los Angeles
Guy Pearce is one of those actors who is so good at what he does that you barely notice that he’s acting.
One such example is his latest role as wealthy Pennsylvania industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren in The Brutalist. Set in post-WWII America, this prominent citizen and landowner initially appears as a kindly benefactor, enlisting Adrien Brody’s visionary architect László Toth to build him a lasting legacy.
But, as the project drags on over the years, we witness how Van Buren’s initial largesse becomes something more manipulative and sinister.
Outwardly accommodating, but prone to bouts of rage and violence, he becomes a symbol for capitalism’s most egregious excesses, asking us to confront the uneasy question of who enables art and the impact that the patronage system can have on an artist and his vision.
In The Brutalist, Pearce sports a moustache, just as he did for his Emmy-winning role in Todd Haynes’ TV mini-series Mildred Pierce.
Ask him how the moustache brings out his inner evil, Pearce laughs. “You feel that you can control anybody! I think it’s also something about the era as well. They were fairly common in that time. And, like all sorts of fashionable things, they come and go. And I think to some degree, for a man, it probably is an additional sense of power or masculinity, and there’s vanity involved as well, depending on how much grooming there is going on. But, yeah, I think it’s probably more to do with the era and it being more of the fashion of the time.
“Hair and makeup artist Gemma Hoff fashioned a wig and moustache for me, and we used a shock of silver hair that aged the character up and gave him a certain authority. There’s a dapper and old-fashioned film-star quality that goes with Van Buren’s charm, strength and power. When I put the costume on, I was thrust into the character,” he says.
“But it’s always funny when you have to do things like that [for a role], and then during the shooting, you have to go out into the real world, and you might have a perm, or have blue, black hair, or some weird facial hair, and you’re sort of apologising to people as you’re buying something from their shop,” he adds.
Not that he’ll be doing much shopping in his native Australia, having recently sold the Melbourne home he’d had for almost 30 years in order to relocate to the Netherlands, close to his nine-year-old son Monte with Dutch actress Carice van Houten.
In many ways, the move feels like the end of an era for the former child actor who got his first big break in Neighbours which also gave a start to the likes of Kylie Minogue, Margot Robbie and Russell Crowe, among a dozen others.
But while his contemporaries were seeking their fortunes far and wide – Hollywood in particular – Pearce had always felt more comfortable back home, recently telling the Los Angeles Times: “I wanted to handle Hollywood the way I wanted to handle it. A lot of people would say I messed up my career because I didn’t go and do big superhero movies like I should have, but I didn’t want to. If I got offered a good job in America, great, I’d do it. And if I wasn’t getting work in America, I’d just be at home in Australia and find work at home.”
So, if he missed out on splashy star-making roles, then he carved out a career as a brilliant and reliable character actor with memorable performances in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Memento, L.A. Confidential, The Hurt Locker and The King’s Speech.
Certainly, this role in The Brutalist has garnered much critical praise, although he is typically modest when he talks about his preparation. “I wasn’t looking at anyone other than the man that I felt emerging off the script, to be honest, so I didn’t feel like I needed to mimic or imitate anyone. I probably also absorbed many characters like that in films that I’d watched over the years, but I certainly didn’t feel like I needed to consciously think of anyone in particular to find Harrison, because he was so clear on the page,” he says of Brady Corbet and Mona Faztvold’s script.
“I think it’s always just about making sure that the character that you’re playing is believable and that the extremities of the character, or the contradictions aren’t out of place or that they don’t fit in the stories, and that’s always the greatest task for me is making sure I’m in the right movie, and making sure that the character essentially is believable and serves the story through that believability in the way that the director intended. That’s always the greatest challenge, and kind of the most important one,” says Pearce, 57.
“Obviously, it’s a historical piece as well. So, just understanding the world and that time period and what were some of the things that one might take for granted versus things that – particularly someone like Van Buren, who is seemingly in control of his world – he is controlling. So, just getting a sense of the scope of his world and his place in it, was primarily the main objective.”
As audience members, we cringe at the interactions between Pearce’s Van Buren Sr and his son Harry played by Joe Alwyn.
“I think that one of the things that is initiated at the very beginning of the story is that my son is trying to do something good for me. But the way in which he does it, he kind of fails because he knows I don’t like surprises. So, it’s one thing to successfully complete the surprise and then bring me in at the right moment and deal with how I might react to that, but the fact that I come in early in the middle of it, is just the worst possible kind of result. And that’s probably something that’s happened a number of times in their relationship. Here’s my son trying to impress me, trying to live up to the kind of a successful father that I seem to be… And yet, he’s on shaky ground.
“I think it’s a very complicated thing for the child of someone very successful, or the child of a powerful character, because I’m sure on some level, the child is proud, but the child is also intimidated. The child is wanting to connect, and the child gets in the way sometimes. It’s a very difficult dynamic.
“And that’s all stuff that Joe and I talked about, and that was evident in the script. Also, you see qualities of Van Buren in Joe’s character, my son, the sort of arrogance and this sense of entitlement but there’s the way in which he handles his own insecurity about it is different to the way Van Buren handles it. Van Buren is more skilled at being engaging, warm, charming, winning the room, whereas poor Joe and the character he plays, he’s not as practiced. He’s a young puppy that’s kind of bashing around in the room and messing up and doesn’t handle women well, doesn’t handle anyone well, but thinks he should be entitled to be able to.
“It was interesting to see the differences between the ways we both played our characters. But also wanting to make that feel authentic and him standing up for me at the end is really heartbreaking as well, I think. Because there’s this sense of duty, that he should stick up for me. And we also don’t know what our past is really, so I think it brings up all sorts of questions about what our traumatic past might be as father and son. It’s a very fraught existence,” says Pearce.
“One of the things I enjoy most about acting is that tightrope you walk between different personality traits and psychologies,” says the actor, who brings a shifting temperament to the film’s most ferocious and symbolic character. “He’s a man of a particular era who is smart, driven and has a passion for success; he knows what it means to be a man in a powerful world.
“Part of his power is to be charming and win people over. He’s troubled, but there’s also a big heart in there, someone who is willing to financially support a struggling immigrant like László, whose architectural talent he recognises. He’s got taste, and if he has power over everyone around him, everything is OK. His entire façade is constructed around that.”
If Pearce disappears into his portrayal of Van Buren, then in Amsterdam, flying under the radar isn’t always a given. “Carice herself is obviously very famous in Amsterdam so the pair of us together, in talking about trying to lead a very private life, which I think I managed in the last 30 years, I certainly blew it by having a baby with Carice… She’s like the queen of Amsterdam so, suddenly with me being there too, it makes for great magazine fodder apparently,” he laughs.
The Brutalist is in cinemas 23 January 2025