Earlier this summer, Guy Pearce appeared for not too long in Ridley Scott’s sort-of Alien prequel, Prometheus. Right now, he’s about to hit the big screen again in the really rather good Lawless. And, as has already been widely reported, he’s set to appear in next summer’s Iron Man 3.
He’s been talking to Vulture as part of the Lawless promotional campaign, then, and he was asked to contrast working on earlier films, such as The Time Machine, with Prometheus and Iron Man 3. “The main difference”, he admitted, “was that when I did The Time Machine, I was pretty much in all of it, so it was a really grueling experience. Prometheus and Iron Man are really kind of cameo stuff, so the experience of shooting them... I mean, on some level, it's tricky because you feel like a bit of an outsider. You don’t really live the experience that you do when you're there all day every day with everybody. But at the same time, it can be more fun sometimes because you're just working in concentrated spurts”.
It doesn’t sound like Pearce is in Iron Man 3 too much, then.
We’re going to do a spoiler for Prometheus here if you haven’t seen the film.
Still here?
Okay. One of the puzzling aspects of Prometheus was that Guy Pearce was cast to play Peter Weyland, yet only appeared under a seeming mountain of ageing make-up. In the original script, there was a scene with Weyland as a young man. So, what happened?
“We didn’t end up shooting that”, said Pearce. “We got close to shooting it, and as we got closer, Ridley just started to see it as something that would just be a little distracting, almost”.
Instead, the only footage that Pearce shot as a young Peter Weyland was the marketing viral with the character giving a lecture. “It was kind of funny that that ended up taking precedence over what was in the movie. So, yeah, I guess in the end they could have cast an older actor”.
Lawless arrives in UK cinemas from 7th September. And you can read the full interview with Guy Pearce here.
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