Guy Pearce got a fright on the set of the 1997 thriller LA Confidential when, for a moment, he thought he might have “killed” his co-star.
The Australian actor starred in the movie as a detective nicknamed “Shotgun Ed” alongside James Cromwell as corrupt police captain Dudley Smith. The starry cast also included Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, Kim Basinger and Danny DeVito.
Speaking in a new reader interview in The Guardian, Neighbours and Memento star Pearce described a scene where his character shoots Cromwell’s police chief in the back of the head.
“When I shot him, the wadding from the shotgun flew out and hit him in the back of the head,” Pearce recalled. “He was 30ft away, so everyone had said: ‘Don’t worry, it’s safe.’ But, for a moment, I thought: ‘Jeez. I’ve killed him. I’ll never work in Hollywood again.’”
There have been numerous on-set incidents involving guns on Hollywood sets over the years. In 2021, during production of the western film Rust in New Mexico, actor Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with a revolver when it fired a live round, killing the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
And Brandon Lee, the son of Bruce Lee, was 28 years old when he died in 1993 after his co-star Michael Massee shot him with a prop gun that malfunctioned while filming a scene for Alex Proyas’s action fantasy The Crow.
In another interview earlier this year, Pearce admitted he hates the performance he gave in the reverse-chronology 2000 movie Memento, in which he played a man suffering from a form of amnesia that prevents him from forming new memories.
“I watched Memento the other day and I’m still depressed,” he told The Times. “I’m s*** in that movie.”
The star added that he was “trying to do a flippant attitude” in the film, “but it was all wrong”, and described the sensation of re-watching his performance as like “nails on a chalkboard”.
“If I reckon my performance in Neighbours is a two out of ten, Memento is a five,” he concluded.
Pearce can next be seen in the Australian prison drama film Inside, out in the UK on 11 August and co-starring newcomer Vincent Miller and Shōgun's Cosmo Jarvis.
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