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3 hours ago
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The Oscars are just one month away and nobody knows anything for sure, apart from the fact that Kieran Culkin is definitely going to win the best supporting actor category. This is all but written in stone at this point. Culkin has won most of the other awards, and he’s a hit on the internet, and so the Oscars themselves are merely a formality.
Which is fine, except that four other people have been nominated for best supporting actor, and they’re faced with spending the next few weeks grinding through a thankless promotional campaign that they know will be fruitless. How does one even begin to do that? In the case of Guy Pearce, who is nominated for The Brutalist, you spend your time telling everyone how rubbish you are.
“I watched Memento the other day and I’m still depressed,” Pearce told the Times this weekend. “I’m shit in that movie. I’d never thought that before, but I did this Q&A of Memento earlier this month and decided to actually watch the film again. But while it was playing, I realised I hate what I did … I watched Memento and realised I’m bad in a good movie. Fuck!” Pearce then went on to say: “If I reckon my performance in Neighbours is two out of ten, Memento is a five.”
The topic came up because, since Memento was made, Christopher Nolan has made a point of casting and recasting the same actors again and again. Take his new movie based on The Odyssey, for instance. So far the names attached include Anne Hathaway (previously in The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar), Matt Damon (Interstellar and Oppenheimer), Robert Pattinson (Tenet), Elliott Page (Inception), Benny Safdie (Oppenheimer), Himesh Patel (Tenet) and Bill Irwin (Interstellar). They do not, however, include Guy Pearce. For that matter, his name hasn’t come up in any film Nolan has made since the year 2000.
And this clearly stings, not least because the “I’m bad in Memento” line isn’t even Pearce’s first try at rationalising this abandonment. In December, he claimed that he hasn’t worked with Nolan again because of a spiteful studio suit. “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,’” he 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.”
Really, it’s unfair that Guy Pearce has to try to explain this at all. Even though it has become a topic of interest online, it isn’t as if he’s the only actor to have only starred in one Christopher Nolan film. Harry Styles hasn’t appeared in a Christopher Nolan film since Dunkirk, for instance, and after Oppenheimer he hasn’t cast Robert Downey Jr in The Odyssey. And then there’s Insomnia to think about. Nolan has made 10 films since then. That’s 10 chances to rehire Al Pacino, arguably the greatest screen actor of our age, and he hasn’t done it a single time. So Guy Pearce might be a Nolan soloist, but so is Pacino. It isn’t exactly a bad group to be in.
Besides, it’s worth pointing out that Guy Pearce isn’t actually bad in Memento at all. That film is such a temporal headache that it needed Pearce’s performance, as groggy and vague as it was, to sell it. It has become trite to say that Nolan’s films are chilly and unemotional, and yet Pearce packed as much humanity into his role as he possibly could. It might have even been the thing that stopped Memento from becoming as impenetrable as Tenet.
Plus, even though he isn’t actually going to win the award, Pearce is now an Oscar-nominated actor. Thanks to his work in The Brutalist, his stock has never been higher. Indeed, he now operates at a level where Christopher Nolan might actually notice him again. Both Nolan and Pearce are artists with long futures ahead of them, so it makes sense that their paths will cross again. That is, unless Christopher Nolan starts hiring Kieran Culkin in his place.
