Guy Pearce Never Needed to Be a Movie Star Guy Pearce Never Needed to Be a Movie Star

After roles in “Memento” and “L.A. Confidential” made him famous, Pearce turned his back on Hollywood. At age 57, he’s returned in “The Brutalist.”

A few years ago, as Guy Pearce filmed a television series in his native Australia, a young actress introduced herself by asking who his American agents were. She was determined to succeed in Hollywood, as she felt he had, and was eager to seek a shortcut.

Pearce was amused by her misplaced moxie. “The idea of rushing to Hollywood, I was in no rush whatsoever,” he said, adding, “I’m still not in any rush.”

You can see why she might have thought otherwise. After Pearce first broke out as a buff and bitchy drag queen in the 1994 comedy “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” Hollywood was poised to make him the next big thing. He soon landed leads in two stone-cold classics, “L.A. Confidential” and “Memento,” but Pearce found lumbering studio blockbusters like “The Time Machine” to be a poor fit for his talents and eventually withdrew from Hollywood’s leading-man rat race: Cheekbones be damned, he was a character actor at heart.

Since then, Pearce, 57, has mostly preferred to take small roles in big projects, appearing briefly in best-picture winners like “The King’s Speech” and “The Hurt Locker” while supporting Kate Winslet in two HBO shows, “Mildred Pierce” and “Mare of Easttown.” But Pearce’s lower profile is about to get a major jolt thanks to the new film “The Brutalist,” which has earned him a Golden Globe nomination and plenty of Oscar chatter.

In the three-and-a-half-hour drama directed by Brady Corbet, Pearce plays the moneyed Pennsylvania industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, who takes on the immigrant architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) as his new pet project. Van Buren is impressed by Tóth’s talent and commissions him to design a community center that could be the capstone to both men’s careers. But Van Buren alternates between encouraging and explosive, and Pearce’s compelling performance keeps both Tóth and the audience on their toes.