Christopher Nolan Needs To Cast Guy Pearce Again
With his upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, Nolan has the chance to reunite with his Memento star.
One of the most exciting things about a new Christopher Nolan movie being announced is learning who he cast. The director has always had stellar ensembles, from the star-powered Inception, to the murderer’s row of prestige actors in Oppenheimer. And, like many auteurs, Nolan often brings back his favorites.
With his upcoming film The Odyssey, an adaptation of the Homer classic led by Matt Damon, Nolan’s starry cast contains a few frequent collaborators: Damon was a scene-stealer in Interstellar and Oppenheimer, while Anne Hathaway and Robert Pattinson are both Nolan stalwarts. But in light of some revelatory comments from Nolan’s first Hollywood lead, the director has the chance to reunite with an actor who’s finally getting a well-deserved comeback.
Guy Pearce makes an astounding, long-deserved comeback in The Brutalist.
Anyone who’s had the chance to see Brady Corbet’s towering immigrant epic The Brutalist will likely have one lingering question: where the hell has Guy Pearce been? Pearce’s slippery, flinty performance as wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren is one of the standout performances in a film full of standout performances. It’s a reminder that Pearce was once one of our most electric leading men, but if you look at his filmography over the past few years, it’s a series of direct-to-video thrillers and forgettable supporting roles. Apart from a few memorable turns in Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels and an underrated villain role in Iron Man 3, it feels like Pearce has been largely absent from major Hollywood productions. And in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Pearce reveals there may have been a reason behind that.
“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,” Pearce told Vanity Fair. “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 [Nolan].”
Warner Bros. essentially gave Nolan carte blanche after the success of his Batman films, but ironically, it was Nolan’s work on Memento, which starred Pearce, that brought Nolan to Warner’s attention (via a recommendation by Steven Soderbergh). You’d think, with Pearce being such a pivotal part of Memento’s success thanks to his magnetic performance as an amnesiac on a quest for revenge, that he’d be part of the package deal with Nolan. But this unnamed executive apparently “didn’t believe in [Pearce] as an actor,” so Pearce was practically blacklisted from Nolan’s films.
To his credit, Nolan had tried to get Pearce into Batman Begins and The Prestige, even flying Pearce to London to discuss the Begins role that eventually went to Liam Neeson. But “it was decided on my flight that I wasn’t going to be in the movie,” Pearce said.
Christopher Nolan directing Guy Pearce on the set of Memento.
But with Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, there’s no better time for the Memento duo to reunite. Nolan fell out with Warner Bros. over the distribution of his 2020 action thriller Tenet, and the filmmaker has since moved to Universal Pictures, a studio that’s been reaping the rewards of backing Nolan’s explosive box office success, Oppenheimer. In the Vanity Fair interview, even Pearce joked that his “time has come” to work with Nolan again, now that this Warner Bros. exec is out of the way.
Yes, the main ensemble of The Odyssey has already been announced — in addition to Damon, Hathaway, and Pattinson, the cast is rounded out by Tom Holland, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, and Charlize Theron — but this is a sprawling epic that spans decades and includes dozens of characters. Who’s to say that Pearce won’t make a surprise comeback as one of the many Greek gods and tragic souls that populate Homer’s epic? It would be a fitting reunion for both men.
