Did Warner Bros. put a kibosh on Guy Pearce’s career? The Australian actor was seemingly flying high. After his breakthrough role in Christopher Nolan’s Memento, and with key roles in Iron Man 3 and Prometheus, he was hot property. Then he went a little quiet.
When Nolan keeps going back to the same group of actors he has enjoyed working with, what happened to Pearce?
According to an interview in Vanity Fair (via Dark Horizons) it turns out the issue wasn’t Nolan, it was Warner Bros.
When Nolan signed exclusively with Warner Bros. Pictures in 2002, an unnamed Warner Bros. Pictures executive just didn’t like him. As he tells it:
“He spoke to me about roles a few times over the years. [It was about] 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.”
The role he missed out on was Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins. Liam Neeson eventually took the role. Pearce says he was actually on the way to meet with them about the role at one point:
“They flew me to London to discuss the Liam Neeson role and I think it was decided on my flight that I wasn’t going to be in the movie. So I get there and Chris is like ‘Hey, you want to see the Batmobile and get dinner?’”
Pearce is getting awards buzz for his role in A24’s The Brutalist. Nolan, meanwhile, is now free of Warner Bros. Could Pearce finally work with Nolan again?