‘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’. 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. “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.”.
