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Transforming Physically to Play Warhol in Factory Girl: Warhol was slighter than Guy Pearce and his skin was a lot more pale than the actor’s. “I did another movie since then where I stacked on about 15 kilos, so I’m a little bigger now than I was a year ago or so,” explained Pearce. “Yeah, that’s right, he had a condition when he was a kid called St. Vitus' dance. It was sort of a nervous condition, but it affected the pigment in his skin. He kind of became this weird translucent-looking ghost in a way.”
Pearce had to wear a lot of pale make-up in Factory Girl. “Absolutely, yeah. And he would also apply make up. I think in the film you see me pop some make up on. There were a number of things that we did to try and get us closer to Warhol’s look.”
Guy Pearce Shares His Thoughts on Andy Warhol: “I think he probably worked a lot harder than people realize. A lot of people that I talked to said you have to remember the amount of work that he actually did. You go to the warehouse, Vincent Fremont/Warhol Enterprises, and you go to the warehouse and you go, ‘Okay, so he did a lot of work.’ And even though you see him on film, a lot of the time if they came to interview him and he was just sitting back on a couch kind of doing nothing. When the cameras went away, he got all the screen prints back out and he worked. He was a workaholic.
I do think he had a particular perspective on the world. I think he was so insecure about his own look and his own background, his own sort of history, that really he had such a fantasy about the life that he wanted to live, and the glamorous life that everybody else seemed to be living, particularly. On one end of the scale you had movie stars and on the other end of the scale you had either drug addicts or politicians or whoever that happened to be, or just anybody walking down the street. I think he had a real fascination, which I think came as a survival technique, based on his own insecurities about himself. I think he was super-sensitive, super-emotional.”
Appreciating Andy Warhol’s Work: Pearce gained a new appreciation for Andy’s work over the course of researching and filming Factory Girl. Asked what he saw in Warhol’s work that he didn’t see prior to taking on the part, Pearce answered, “Well, a couple of things. One really was just having more of an understanding of the guy, so therefore looking at the work going, ’Huh, I know about the person who’s behind that idea, who’s behind that painting, etc.’
But, actually, it was also about just accessing more work, seeing all the illustrations that he did through the ‘50s when he worked as a commercial artist. That’s where he really worked, and worked, and worked. He’s such a beautiful illustrator and such a beautiful colorist that those drawings, beautiful drawings of shoes and cats and all this gorgeous stuff that he did, which clearly indicates that he is a brilliant artist. I think that was his dilemma. He knew he was a great artist, as far as actually being able to be an artist. But then you can’t jump from commercial art into fine art without copping flack. And even just trying to do it, I think, was difficult enough. I think that really forced him to kind of look at art in a whole different way and go, ‘Well, if I’m going to get in, I’ve got to get in in a different way.’ And go, ‘Well actually maybe that’s no more art than that anyway, so here’s a picture of a Campbell soup can.’ He kind of started off in a fine art sense with using the same products and things that he used in a commercial art sense. It was really strange, but he changed the way people look at the world.”
On Disappearing Inside His Characters: “I just feel like you go as far as it feels right to go, you know? I just wonder whether we all have different thresholds and for some people they go, ‘Yeah, I’m the character now,’ and you think, ‘You’re so not the character yet.’ And consequently you see people kind of play the same role in every film they ever do. And they do that pretty well, some people. I don’t know, I just find people, as Andy says in the film, so fascinating and kind of endless qualities to people so maybe I’m sort of… I don’t know, it sounds wrong, I was going to say maybe I’m a perfectionist or something, but probably no more than anybody else.”
Up Next – A Movie About Harry Houdini: Pearce follows up his role as Andy Warhol by playing legendary magician Harry Houdini in Death Defying Acts. While Pearce studied as much audio and video as he could on Warhol, he didn’t approach tackling the role of Houdini in the same manner. “I treated that completely differently,” explained Pearce. “It’s almost a fictional fairytale anyway. There’s footage of Houdini and there’s audio stuff of him, but I decided to go in a completely different direction and really just work off what my own imaginative response was to the script anyway, I think, rather than really just trying to channel somebody, which is what I felt like I tried to do with Andy in a way.”
Preparing to play Houdini meant Pearce had to gain a little weight. “It wasn’t that I had to build up because it was more physical, I had to build up because Houdini is built like a Sherman tank. I was 63 kilos when I made Factory Girl and I was 75 kilos when I did Death Defying Acts. It’s interesting, really, to play the two characters back-to-back because Andy is so light, white, fey... Everything about him is floaty and kind of light and not wanting to be noticed in a way, whereas Houdini was very grounded, very gruff, very deep voice, very masculine. Completely opposite ends of the spectrum, as far as physicality and a number of other things. Both [were] highly self-promoting, poor immigrants of the 20th century, but aside from that they were pretty different.”
