After his acclaimed performances in films such as LA Confidential, The Proposition, Memento, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Animal Kingdom and The Hurt Locker, you may be surprised that Guy Pearce has just been nominated for an Oscar for the first time: for his turn as the sociopathic industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren in The Brutalist. Or maybe you haven’t noticed Pearce’s Oscars campaign because he keeps rubbishing his own career: he was “shit” in Memento (“I’m bad in a good movie. Fuck!”), worse in Neighbours (“I played the same thing and it fucking drove me nuts”) and has cheerfully owned up to acting in “a bunch of shit during my divorce because I needed the money”.
As awards campaigns go – well, it’s a lot better than Karla Sofía Gascón’s. Not that Pearce has paid attention. “One of the [Emilia Pérez] actors said something on social media, right?” he says, in the understatement of the century.
Though The Brutalist is at the front of everyone’s minds, Pearce is promoting a completely different film: Inside, in which he plays a downtrodden prisoner who tries to convince a younger inmate to kill his notorious cellmate.
But what is it like now being “Academy Award nominee” Guy Pearce? “It’s funny,” he says, rubbing that square jaw that suits both rich US industrialists and rough Australian inmates. “Not funny that I haven’t had one before – just funny to even get one, I reckon. I stop and go, ‘Wow, is that – really? OK? That’s really happened?’”
Pearce is supremely unbothered by the fuss. “I’ve been nominated for a few of these awards, and I haven’t won any!” he says, laughing. “I’m not gonna win! Kieran [Culkin] will win, again.” Has he got a speech ready? “I’ve had one I’ve thought about for the last three months now – haven’t used it once! Nah, I’ll just forget it.”
Pearce has a reputation as one of the more down-to-earth actors in the business: years of living in LA and now Amsterdam has not softened the Aussie contempt for puff and bullshit. He’s sweetly unguarded which can cause him trouble: two weeks before we speak, he made headlines for telling the Guardian his ex-wife, Kate Mestitz, was the love of his life – and not the Dutch actor Carice van Houten, his partner and mother of his eight-year-old son, Monte. The resulting outrage led Van Houten to issue an affectionate public statement, clarifying that she and Pearce actually broke up years ago without anyone knowing.
“Oh God,” Pearce groans, of the headline. “It blew up into this whole thing! Look, let’s face it, I was in love with Kate when I was 12 – she got a pretty good run-up compared to anyone else in my life. So it’s a fair enough thing to say.”
He and Van Houten “never felt the need to say anything” about their separation “because it’s nobody’s bloody business”, he says. “But Carice was really copping it in Holland. I mean, so was I. But she and I are the best of friends. We live together and look after our boy, and we function like a family. We have a great love, we adore each other. So yes, she probably is the love of my life now.”
Carice van Houten and Guy Pearce at the 2025 Baftas on 16 February. Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
Then, a week after we speak, Pearce told an interviewer about how Kevin Spacey “targeted” him on the set of LA Confidential and how he “sobbed” decades later when the allegations against Spacey began to emerge. (Spacey responded by telling him to “grow up”, to which Pearce declines to comment further.)
In the unsettling Australian prison drama Inside, the feature debut of its director, Charles Williams, Pearce plays Warren Murfett, a prisoner on the precipice of parole, who befriends younger inmate, Mel (a remarkable Vincent Miller), and convinces him to kill his notorious cellmate, Mark Shepard, who has been imprisoned since he was 13 for mass murder. Played by Shōgun’s Cosmo Jarvis (doing the best Aussie accent by a foreigner since Dev Patel in Lion), Shepard unnerves the other prisoners with his wide-eyed sermons, often breaking out in tongues; killing him, Warren tells Mel, “is the right thing, the best thing” he can do with his life.
Guy Pearce and Vincent Miller as Warren and Mel in Inside. Photograph: Mathew Lynn
Warren cuts an angry, sorrowful figure: he reserves his little enthusiasm for completing the celebrity trivia on the wrappers of sweets that are clearly modelled on Austalia’s Fantales. (Who cares about Oscars – Pearce was once a Fantale entry.) Pearce loved how realised Warren was; he hates turning up on set and feeling that the character is half baked: “If a director says to me, ‘You can build the character however you want’ – I don’t want to build a character! That always worries me, because I don’t necessarily do my best work when I have to do that. I don’t trust myself.”
Inside was filmed in a real prison near Geelong in Australia that hasn’t yet opened. “The staff are all there, the wardens are all there – we had to go through full security checks every time we came in and out every day, but we had the run of the place, which was quite incredible,” Pearce says.
Between scenes he would walk around the prison, talking to the wardens (“A lot of them have worked in prisons for years. They had stories”) and the extras, many of whom were formerly incarcerated: “I was getting a sense of how prison works – who would be where at what time, how you could move from here to there.”
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