Guy Pearce tackles playing one of America's most recognizable pop culture icons, Andy Warhol, in the dramatic movie Factory Girl. Directed by George Hickenlooper and starring Sienna Miller as Warhol's muse Edie Sedgwick, Factory Girl examines the relationship between Warhol and Sedgwick and how Sedgwick's introduction into Warhol's world of sex and drugs and art completely changed life.
Researching the Role: Guy Pearce isn’t the first actor to take on playing Andy Warhol in a feature film, however Pearce didn’t really use those other performances as any kind of reference for how he’d portray Warhol in Factory Girl. Instead, Pearce went deeper and conducted a lot of research with people who knew Warhol.
“Well, all the research that I did certainly, in my mind, superceded my perception of the other performances that I’d seen. I felt like they were kind of different perspectives on Andy anyway. Bowie’s is the ‘80s and it’s after he’s been shot. Jared [Harris’] is during that period with Valerie Solanas. The interesting thing about Harris’ Andy Warhol I think, which is great for the film, is that you don’t kind of really get inside Andy too much, which I think helps us as an audience feel Valerie’s frustration with him. I guess that justifies shooting him (laughing) to a certain point. And Crispin [Glover], his moment in The Doors it’s such a trippy kind of thing anyway. I felt like they were all different.
I had seen them all before. I did watch them all again once just to kind of go, ‘Hmm, hmm,’ but then all the research stuff that I had, particularly all the audio recordings… Brigid Berlin allowed me to – and Vincent Fremont who takes care of all her work - they allowed me to re-record some of the phone conversations that she and Andy made. Andy and Brigid basically taped every phone conversation they had from the ‘60s onwards, so Brigit was obsessed. She was quite wealthy and had all this money to bug her whole house. That’s a whole other story in itself. So she recorded every phone conversation that she had with Andy. I’ve become quite friendly with Brigid now and she was wonderful as far as research goes. And so all that audio stuff just left everything else behind, as far as my perception on other films. She said to me one day, I’d gone in and I got all these recordings of those two together and started working with them, and then said to me one day, ‘Oh, November 16th, 1971, go to the box and you’ll find. I tell Andy Edie died.’ And sure enough, I go to the box and there’s a tape: I tell Andy Edie died. And their conversation is just – it’s so heartbreaking.”
Pearce gained a lot of insight into Warhol from his reactions during that phone conversation. “He had a number of reactions, the phone conversation goes for five minutes. There were a couple of moments where he’s clearly shocked and stunned by what’s happened. And his very first reaction is to go, ‘Who, what, where, how, why, who?’ And he does an incredible job of evading the actual information. Then there’s a huge long pause – they end up talking about her husband for a while, Michael Post - and then there’s this huge long pause and Andy says, ‘Does he get all the money?’ And then they get back into it again and Brigid’s clearly not happy with that response. Then there’s another big pause after they talk about some other stuff and Andy says, and you can tell he’s about to cry, he says, ‘Gee, I just thought she was going to pull through and get well,’ or something like that. So in typical Warhol fashion, I think he didn’t want to attach to the emotional response and tried to evade.”
Mastering the Mannerisms and Accent: “Well, I knew about the film in April I think, so I started reading and looking at documentaries and doing all the research, and then we shot in November. I kind of had a good six months to really play around with stuff.”
Pearce didn’t need to work with a coach to get Warhol right. “No, there’s so much material to use, there’s so much footage, and there is many, many more hours of footage out there that I didn’t even get to see. So, no, I think using these audio tapes were a great help.”
Teaming Up with Sienna Miller to Capture Their Characters: Sienna Miller says she and Pearce would work hard off the set and prior to filming to really get into their characters. “We really were in each other’s pockets for quite some time, Sienna and I. We met in England and really started to work on the script there. There were still things we needed to clarify in the script, I think, and we were doing so much research. I read about 30 books on Andy and she read how many books there were on Edie that existed. We went to Pittsburgh together. We went to the Warhol Museum and they allowed us to look at whole lot of footage of Edie and Andy that no one had seen really before, and just spent a long time together.
We spent about six weeks together in New York, the first chunk, and then another huge chunk after that, and really we got on so well. We were really supportive of each other. I think we were just really eager to kind of, you know, ‘How am I doing? How am I doing?,’ kind of stuff. It was a great experience because she was really open and willing to go the whole way, clearly as one should - and I was too. It was actually a really nice reflection too, I think, of probably, potentially, the energy that might have initially been sparked when Andy and Edie found each other in the first place.”
Page 2: Guy Pearce on Andy Warhol, the Physical Transformation, and His Upcoming Movie Death Defying Acts
