Following the critical flop of his 2002 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Guy Pearce had a new perspective on his career.
The 2x Golden Globe nominee explained why working on the big-budget DreamWorks/Warner Bros. feature made him feel like his “intuition doesn’t mean anything,” putting him off from working with big studios in the future.
“I think the process of it felt way too big for me,” he explained to GQ. “I can’t make [sense of] this idea of studio films where you just get told what to do by people afraid to lose their jobs. I remember there were discussions at the beginning about how I was going to look. A couple of the executives say, ‘No, he’ll just cut his hair and he’ll just do this and he’ll do that.’ And I’m in the room going, Hello? I’m immediately feeling like my intuition doesn’t mean anything here. That’s a killer for me.”
Pearce added, “It was the first time I really felt that there was not just a disconnect, but a kind of greater power up there that you couldn’t even really talk to.”
The actor previously speculated that one Warner Bros. exec “just didn’t believe in me as an actor” as he revealed the unnamed suit blocked him from working with Christopher Nolan after their team-up on the psychological thriller Memento (2000).
Guy Pearce in The Time Machine (2002) (Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection)
“He spoke to me about roles a few times over the years,” Pearce told Vanity Fair of Nolan. “The first Batman and The Prestige. But there was an executive at Warner Bros. who quite openly said to my agent, ‘I don’t get Guy Pearce. I’m never going to get Guy Pearce. I’m never going to employ Guy Pearce.’ So, in a way, that’s good to know. I mean, fair enough; there are some actors I don’t get. But it meant I could never work with Chris.”
Pearce is currently nominated for Best Supporting Actor — Motion Picture at the 82nd Golden Globe Awards for his performance in The Brutalist.