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Guy Pearce was Christopher Nolan's first choice for Batman Begins big bad, but Warner Bros. exec blacklisted him from the company according to the actor
Pearce said that director Christopher Nolan wanted him for the part that eventually went to Liam Neeson, but an unnamed executive stood in everyone's way
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Given the critical and commercial success that came from 2000’s Memento, you could be forgiven for wondering why director Christopher Nolan and actor Guy Pearce never worked together again afterwards. Turns out, they tried, but the decision was in the hands of someone else altogether… but things might look very different moving forward.
Talking to Vanity Fair, Pearce claimed that he was in the running to appear in 2005’s Batman Begins as the Henri Ducard character portrayed by Liam Neeson, but an unnamed executive at the studio prevented that from happening. “There was an executive at Warner Bros. who quite openly said to my agent, ‘I don’t get Guy Pearce. I’m never going to get Guy Pearce. I’m never going to employ Guy Pearce.’ So, in a way, that’s good to know. I mean, fair enough; there are some actors I don’t get,” he explained. “But it meant I could never work with Chris.”
This happened despite the fact that Nolan was actively trying to get Pearce involved in projects, the actor said. “They flew me to London to discuss the Liam Neeson role and I think it was decided on my flight that I wasn’t going to be in the movie. So I get there and Chris is like ‘Hey, you want to see the Batmobile and get dinner?’”
The unofficial blacklisting (if it was, in fact, real and not just a rumor Pearce heard and chose to believe) impacted more than just Nolan’s Batman movies; Pearce also suggests that he and Nolan discussed a potential role in 2006’s The Prestige, but Nolan worked with Warner Bros. on all of his movies from 2002 through 2020 — that’s nine movies in total. (Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet, if you’re wondering.) The relationship between filmmaker and studio came to an end when Universal Pictures released 2023’s Oppenheimer, with Nolan and Universal re-teaming for his untitled 2026 project.
Could that movie feature a Guy Pearce appearance? No party is saying anything just now — the new movie will include Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, and Zendaya, amongst others — but at least we’ll know that no-one at Universal will be standing in their way. Unless Guy Pearce has upset someone over there, as well…
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