Guy Pearce has racked up a fair share of iconic film characters since at least the ‘90s, but one role he isn’t able to escape? The amnesiac Leonard Shelby in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento.” Twenty years after the release of the film, Pearce looks back at how the iconic script made him question his own memory.
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In a video interview with GQ, Guy Pearce talks about how his agent sent him the script with a note that the story moved backwards, which prepared him a bit to tackle the character. “The thing was that even though on some level it felt like gobbledegook as I was reading it, because you got the sense that things were all over the place, what I really got and what was really clear was the emotional journey of the character.” Peace said. “As the actor that’s the only thing I need to latch onto in order to do my job. The other stuff began to make sense the more as I worked with Chris Nolan and rehearsed with him. Once it all made sense to me, I then had to put it all away and let it all go and just treat every scene as its own little thing because I wasn’t supposed to remember what had happened before and obviously had no clue what was coming afterwards.”
Turns out, you weren’t the only one confused by the timeline of the movie. Indeed, Pearce said working on “Memento” made him question himself. “It made me question my own memory,” Pearce said. “I would look at a photo and would be thinking about a memory around it and then go, ‘Well I don’t know if that memory is really true at all.’ It really made me question my own memories, so thank you, Chris Nolan.” Of course, the actor had nothing but praise for Nolan and the script he wrote. “Chris Nolan clearly is a genius. His ability to write the story and make the film that was in his head as it is. It’s the only film I’ve ever done where the finished film is exactly as the script was.”
You can watch the rest of the interview where Pearce relives his most notable characters in the video below.