An article by Jamie Stuart
Guy
Pearce is the type of man with features so chiseled that the only thing he ever
could have been was a movie star. This is not somebody you might run into in
real life. He wouldn’t be handing out flyers on a street corner. Or vegetating
in an office cubicle.
As a movie star he’s appeared in films like L.A. Confidential and Memento.
He hasn’t used his looks to further a career as a mainstream leading man.
Instead, he’s primarily opted for smaller films playing characters where, even
if they are the good guys, they’re really not that good. This can certainly be
said of his new film The Hard Word, in which he plays a crook with an
enlarged nose and a jutting chin. We spoke recently in New York.
“I’ve never considered myself to be particularly heroic,” he begins. “I
like the idea of playing a character who’s got a heroic sort of quality about
him, but not because I feel heroic. But because it’s something quite different
to me. You see Tom Cruise or George Clooney – they naturally play those kinds
of guys all the time. I’m always a little too anxious for that, I guess.”
Guy first gained exposure on the Australian soap opera Neighbours, which
also briefly featured his L.A. Confidential co-star Russell Crowe. While Neighbours
was the show that initially got him established, it also helped turn him off to
the limelight. Of the transition from TV to American features, he humorously
explains, “It seems, so many people come up to me and say, ‘God, it’s so
surprising that you’re working overseas, cause we just thought you were shit
in that TV show!’”
He continues: “After the TV show I did in Australia when I was 18 – and it
was hugely popular in Australia, New Zealand and Europe – we experienced that
kind of Beatlemania. I just went like, God, this is ridiculous! It’s great for
a minute, but it’s completely ridiculous.”
Rather than following that fame through, Guy focused on characters that could
best be described as antiheroes, or worse, possibly, just plain unlikable
blokes. Sometimes, in the case of Memento, his character has no
character, since he can’t remember what he’s done only moments before.
Guy’s primary position is: “I like the idea of drawing the audience into a
character who they normally wouldn’t be drawn to. And normally wouldn’t want
to understand. Normally wouldn’t want to feel empathy for. But for some reason
or other, they wind up feeling sympathy for them.”
For The Hard Word, he donned a prosthetic nose and dirtied himself up to
play a career con, which is also, for lack of anybody else, the film’s
protagonist. The make-up was his idea, and it ironically came to him while
filming two big budget features.
“While I was doing The Count of Monte Cristo and subsequently The
Time Machine, I had The Hard Word with me and I was reading it,
thinking about it. I felt with Dale that there was the weight of the world on
his shoulders. And maybe this is a bit of a cliché, but I thought as a criminal
he should be a heavy-ass kind of guy. So, I found as I was reading it, my jaw
would come forward and my brow would do this and I sat like this. I started
going, what else can I do? What else can I do to make this heavier? I suppose
the last thing in the world I wanted was to make Dale look pretty. I didn’t
want him to be a pretty boy. So, I just started thinking about what I could do.
I thought about extending my nose – or just making it slightly heavier.”
His approach worked perfectly for a film he considers to be, “…Pretty
crass,” but elaborates, “I thought it was quite funny. And I really enjoyed,
I suppose, the combination of the sense of humor of these guys and the violence
of what they were doing. The brutality of what they were doing – even though
they weren’t hurting anybody. I just kinda liked that combination. It’s very
Australian, sort of. You have this very harrowing situation, but they’re smart
asses about it. I was in the mood to do something quite Australian. Probably
because we were colonized by – we’re convicts, really. America is the land
of freedom, and Australia is a prison. To survive prison you kinda need a sense
of humor about it. That probably infiltrated the psyche of Australia for the
last couple hundred years.”
Perhaps, it’s this condition that’s offered us some of the most talented
actors of this generation – actors as diverse as the previously mentioned
Crowe, as well as Naomi Watts and Nicole Kidman.
Of course, that’s not a very original observation. And while I have no way of
knowing what drives the others, Guy sums up his reasons by proclaiming,
“Acting is therapy, really. Or…it drives you to therapy.”
-Copyright
2003 by Jamie
Stuart