The movie that derailed Guy Pearce’s career: “The only solution was to step away”

Posted On February 18, 2025February 18, 2025

In the early 2000s, Guy Pearce was poised to become Hollywood’s next biggest star. He was on a trajectory similar to that of Brad Pitt and Russell Crowe, and it seemed that he was destined for a similar level of fame and career opportunities.But just when he was about to break through, everything came crashing down, and it would take decades for him to finally reassert his talents in a film that could showcase them.

Pearce got his start in Australian television, playing a young heartthrob on the popular soap opera Neighbours. He gained widespread critical acclaim for playing a drag queen in the 1994 road comedy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and scored two major international breakthroughs with the 1997 police procedural LA Confidential and Christopher Nolan’s 2000 mind-bending neo-noir Memento.

After proving his theatrical mettle, Pearce was ready to become a star, and the Hollywood machine kicked into gear to facilitate it. Unfortunately, it made all the wrong decisions on his behalf. His first starring role in a major studio production was as Dr Alexander Hartdegen, the associate professor of applied mechanics and engineering at an American university who invents a time machine that takes him a casual 800,000 years into the future.

It was based on the 1895 H G Wells novel of the same name and was directed by Wells’s great-grandson, Simon Wells, even though he had no experience working on live-action films. Things were bad from the start. The main issue, as anyone working on a big-budget flop can sympathise with, was producer interference.

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2002, Pearce described the experience as “a gruelling test of patience and nerves” and said that the cast was forced to endure conflicting input. “It’s their money, so they have the right to interfere,” he said, “But when you’ve got producers on set all the time saying, ‘What about this? Why don’t we do that?…”

It didn’t go down well. The director either quit or was fired before the production finished. He was, according to Pearce, “really starting to make ridiculous decisions. I think the studio went, ‘Let’s just let him go and have a rest and we’ll bring someone else in to shoot the last five weeks.’” It didn’t help. When the film was released, it was panned by critics and lost a sizeable portion of its alleged $240million budget. 

In a 2024 interview with GQ, the actor reflected on the experience, saying, “I think 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… I’m immediately feeling like my intuition doesn’t mean anything here. That’s a killer for me.” It was the first time he felt like there was a disconnect between himself and the person pulling all the strings, and it wasn’t something he wanted to be a part of in the industry. “The only solution was to step away and regroup,” he concluded.

Pearce’s career took a major hit after his starring vehicle crashed. Recently, he revealed that Christopher Nolan had tried to cast him in various projects, including the first Batman in 2005 and The Prestige in 2006, but that an executive at Warner Bros. had nixed it. “[He] 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,’” the actor recalled.

Recently, Pearce’s performance as a mercurial business mogul in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist has earned him rave reviews and an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor.’ It was a long-overdue opportunity for a performer whose potential was evident way back in the ’90s, but who was never offered a significant second chance until now.

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