Pearce’s power patron in ‘The Brutalist’ is the best revenge

Guy Pearce walked to his recent press day in Los Angeles. The hotel where the interviews were taking place was just a few blocks from the LA condo he bought around the time he was shooting “Memento” in 1999 and has held onto ever since. He would walk back home at the end of the day. There is something candid and unpretentious about Pearce, including how he talks about his profession.”I suppose on some level I’m interested in demystifying it a little bit,” Pearce, 57, said over coffee in a corner table of the hotel’s restaurant, with a hillside view of the city unfurling behind him. “It’s a funny life because it’s always sort of being assessed in a way, and we’re all assessing it together. You are asking me questions about me, I’m sort of trying to analyze myself and it’s out there in the public.

“I’m trying to always be easier on myself as time goes on,” he adds. “I’ve had darker, more troubled times and been grumpy at lots of things in the past, but I feel life’s pretty good these days.” In between his two walks, Pearce would mostly be talking about his new movie “The Brutalist,” which has earned rave reviews and rapturous responses ever since it premiered without a distributor at the Venice Film Festival. Picked up by upstart awards powerhouse A24, the film generated a lot of attention in advance of its limited release on Friday, with special 70mm engagements happening early.

Pearce is the kind of hiding-in-plain-sight character actor that can be all too easy to overlook. Having begun as a child performer in Australia, he launched to stardom there while still a teenager on the TV soap opera “Neighbours” (which also gave a start to the likes of Kylie Minogue, Margot Robbie and Russell Crowe). His turns in films such as “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” “L.A. Confidential” and “Memento” soon made him familiar to American audiences as well. He would go on to a diverse slate of work: appearances in Oscar winners such as “The Hurt Locker” and “The King’s Speech”; a villain in the big-budget superhero adventure “Iron Man 3”; an Emmy for his playboy opposite Kate Winslet in the miniseries “Mildred Pierce.”

“He doesn’t do anything by half,” Winslet tells The Times via email. “He’s utterly committed. He’s completely supportive of every other cast member. And he doesn’t make any fuss. He just quietly gets on with the job and then destroys everyone with his killer performances every single time.” But if Pearce can be seen as something of a humble craftsman, his work in “The Brutalist” may be his masterpiece, in that it pulls together strands from throughout his career. As the film’s wealthy Pennsylvania industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, Pearce creates a psychologically penetrating portrait of a man who is by turns generous and predatory, inquisitive and closed off, someone who ultimately reveals himself to be capable of true evil. (The performance has already earned Pearce nominations from multiple awards-granting groups.)

Set in post-WWII America, “The Brutalist” sees Van Buren hiring immigrant architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) to build a monumental institute — a massive structure including a chapel — as a tribute to his late mother. As the project drags on over years, Van Buren’s patronage becomes a form of exploitation as he takes more and more from Tóth. If there is something that connects many of Pearce’s best roles, it is an ability to play people who don’t quite understand themselves, characters in which there is a distance between how they present themselves and who they really are.

“Most of the time we do it without even realizing,” says Pearce, sitting upright as he seems to engage deeply with the connection between his characters and reality. “We try to be smarter than we are. We try to be funnier than we are. We try to be more confident than we are. But all these things are slightly different to how we are when we’re sitting at home on our own.” Leaning into the idea, he continues, “So that disconnect exists all over the place and to play that stuff — the beauty about film is you can do that.”

Shot in the rarely-used widescreen format of VistaVision, “The Brutalist,” a labor of love for its director-co-writer Brady Corbet, was made for a reported $10 million on a production schedule of just 33 days, which, given the scope and scale of the movie, makes its sense of ambition and sprawl seem inconceivable.

Tribune News Service