Australian actor Guy Pearce has opened up about how he felt after a 2002 film he starred in flopped, causing him to reassess his career.
The 57-year-old, who is nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 2025 Goldeb Globes for his role in The Brutalist, was a rising star in Hollywood in the late Nineties and early Noughties thanks to roles in LA Confidential and Memento.
However, Pearce claims he had a bad experience when making the movie The Time Machine, a remake of a 1960 sci-fi classic inspired by HG Welles’ 1895 novel of the same name.
Although the film, which also stars Jeremy Iron and Samantha Mumba, made more than $100m at the box office, it received mostly poor reviews and currently holds a rating of just 28 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.
In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald in 2002, Pearce described the shoot as a “gruelling test of patience and nerves” and that he was “not at all happy”.
Now speaking to GQ, he said that the “process of it felt way too big for me”.
“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,” he said. “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,’” he added. “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.”
“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.”
It comes after Pearce claimed that he was barred from reuniting with director Christopher Nolan by an executive at Warner Bros.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Pearce said he was considered for roles in those films but ultimately rejected.
“He spoke to me about roles a few times over the years,” Pearce said 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.”
Asked to clarify whether the Warner Bros. executive had a “no Guy Pearce” policy, Pearce added: “I think he just didn’t believe in me as an actor.”
