Guy Pearce on playing Houdini

Actor Guy Pearce has spoken with Movies Online about what it was like to play Houdini in the new film, Death Defying Acts, co-starring Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Q: You’re also playing Harry Houdini in a movie, how did you approach that? Obviously there’s not video on him.

GP: No, I treated that completely differently. 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.

Q: Is Death Defying Acts the name of the film?

GP: Yeah

Q: When is that coming out?

GP: I don’t know actually, because I think they’re still putting it together. We only finished it in October.

Q: What was the movie that you got bulked up for?

GP: It was for Harry Houdini, it was Death Defying Acts.

Q: Was that because it was a physically demanding role?

GP: 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, he’s very masculine, completely opposite ends of the spectrum, as far as physicality and a number of other things, both highly self-promoting, poor immigrants of the 20th century, but aside from that they were pretty different.