How Guy Pearce Walked Away With The Brutalist, the Indie Movie of the Year

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Lately, I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about Guy Pearce’s face. That dramatically protruding bone structure. The way the twin spears of his cheekbones echo the laser-cut jawline that comes to a fine point at the beveled edge of his chin. His cheeks are drawn taut, concave at their hollows, which causes the skin around them to crease when he smirks or grimaces. His eyes are deep-set. His brow is naturally arched, his nose is upturned, his lips naturally pursed. He looks wholesome and regal and sleazy, sacred and profane, like an angel who fucks. It raises the question: Why has an actor with these sculpted features spent the last two decades retreating from the center of the shows and films he’s worked on, seeking out opportunities to play cowards, freaks, and dickheads?

I admittedly hadn’t thought much about Guy Pearce in the abstract until recently, and you probably haven’t either. It’s easy to take him for granted. That face has been part of the landscape of the movies—Hollywood cinema and independent cinema and international cinema—for 30 years, since Pearce emerged from the chrysalis of Neighbours (Australia’s longest-running soap opera) as a candy-colored blistering-hot drag queen movie star in 1994’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Minus one brief but significant sabbatical, he’s worked constantly over the ensuing three decades—across television and film, in prosthetics, in 16th-century period pieces, in films set in the Prohibition-era South, in outer space, in Tom Clancy adaptations, in two Best Picture winners, and with constantly migrating accents. He has been a spewer of rage, the picture of composure, a dumper of exposition. He’s played Andy Warhol, Prince Albert, Harry Houdini, and Henry VIII, but he’s not quite a chameleon. He can’t be, with that face. But although he looks enough like a superhero that he was offered Daredevil back in the day, he’d rather play Aldrich Killian, the guy who mutates himself with nanotech to kill Tony Stark. Pearce is something of a mutant strain himself—a twist on an old Hollywood cliché, a character-actor-in-a-movie-star’s-body who has actually carved out a character actor’s career.

“I would never describe Guy as a movie star,” says Kate Winslet, Pearce’s costar in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce and Mare of Easttown, “because he would hate to be described as such himself. He would never want anyone to say, ‘Oh, you’ve achieved X or Y.’ The word achieve would probably make him feel slightly nauseous. He’s not utterly without ego, but he is entirely with exceptional taste and instinct…. He will look at a role and it will be his instinct that guides him. How much will he be pushed? How much of a challenge will that be for him? That’s what he looks at and he’s so multifaceted that, you know, frankly, he can do anything.”

I started reconsidering Pearce’s capabilities the moment he barges onscreen—Madeira-drunk, red-faced, and indignant—in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which hits theaters this week. In his first two films, Corbet proved himself a prodigy, with Coppola-size ambition to tell big American stories and an eye for grandiose compositions that recalls Luchino Visconti. But his latest—a gorgeous, 215-minute, VistaVision epic about assimilation and the uneasy relationship between art and commerce, and the contempt and avarice of the American gentry class—represents a major step forward. It’s a potentially massive Oscar player, and Pearce’s performance is a big part of why that is. His subtly named mid-Atlantic oligarch Harrison Lee Van Buren is a middlebrow sociopath both envious and resentful of the genius of an artist (Adrien Brody) he’s driven to both possess and destroy. It’s a role that ensures we’ll never take Pearce for granted again, and represents the culmination of 20 years of tireless work for an actor who once walked away from Hollywood’s conventional superstar trajectory in search of a film, and a moment, precisely like this one.