Interview: Guy Pearce, actor and star of Lawless

SOME actors just want to be loved by an audience. Guy Pearce, on the other hand, says he hopes you’re repulsed by his sadistic Special Deputy in Lawless, the violent Prohibition-era gangster film from the creators of The Proposition – director John Hillcoat and writer Nick Cave.

Charged with closing down illegal distilleries in the mountains of Virginia, Charlie Rakes is the most corrupt – and with his shaved eyebrows, bizarre centre parting and obsessive fastidiousness, the weirdest-looking – character in the movie. It is another total transformation by Pearce, who, since leaving Neighbours, has emerged as one of cinema’s most chameleonic actors.

As vivid as the character is now, though, it wasn’t as defined in the first draft that Pearce read of Cave’s screenplay. This wasn’t necessarily a problem. “When you look at a Nick Cave script, you know there are other drafts,” says Pearce, a wiry 44 year old, when we meet after the film’s world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. “Nick is a very visceral and emotional and evocative writer, but he tends to continually expand as he goes.”

Whereas he would normally leap at the chance to work with Hillcoat, who directed him in The Proposition and The Road – because the filmmaker is “nutty and prepared to do anything” – Pearce hesitated when the Brighton-based Aussie Hillcoat tapped him for Lawless. He’d just come off a string of projects, including The King’s Speech, Mildred Pierce and the action-thriller Lockout, and was exhausted.

“I can’t do film after film. So when John said, ‘I really want you to do this thing,’ I said, ‘I need a lie down.’ I just need to go home and be me occasionally, you know?”

Pearce told Cave that if he was going to do it, he didn’t want to be “the cop that’s just there for the sake of it”. Cave agreed.

“Nick said, ‘I don’t want him to be that either. He’s digusting, he’s vain, and this, that and the other.’ I was a little hard on him because I wanted to take a break, and I said, ‘Well not all that’s in the script yet.’ So he slowly implemented things and we shot more than has ended up in the film.”

Together, they came up with someone who should seem “strange and disgusting” to both the audience and the other characters.

“That was really important, and that’s why I love working for John, because I find he’s prepared to go where other directors wouldn’t. He really loves extreme characters and I appreciate that bravery in him.”

Cave says he was just as thrilled to have another chance to work with one of his favourite actors: “The stuff Guy did on LA Confidential, all his films, really, is kind of riveting. There’s something about him that’s so wound up inside that face of his. So I re-invented Rakes from the character that’s in the book for something that he could get his teeth into.”

“The book” was Matt Bondurant’s 2008 novel based on the exploits of his moonshine-making grandfather Jack and grand-uncles Forrest and Howard, played in the film by Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy and Jason Clarke respectively. While the confrontations between the siblings and Rakes are frequently graphically brutal – Hillcoat always tries to make the violence in his films “confronting” –life off camera was altogether lighter.

“Tom Hardy and I played these two angry characters and we’d sit together in the make-up room playing Angry Birds,” says Pearce, laughing. “That’s how we connected to our anger.” It was the same on the grim Outback western The Proposition, working alongside Ray Winstone, Danny Huston and John Hurt. “We laughed a lot on that. And we kept thinking that it’s really funny that we keep laughing on this really violent movie, which made us laugh even more.” In one especially shocking scene in Lawless, Rakes makes mincemeat of Jake’s face with his fist. Did the violence affect him?