Guy Pearce says WB exec barred him from working with Christopher Nolan

Despite their acclaimed collaboration on Memento, Guy Pearce hasn’t starred in any Christopher Nolan projects since — and he thinks one man is to blame.

The L.A. Confidential star recently explained why he stopped working with Nolan, saying he has “not really” kept in touch with the filmmaker. “He spoke to me about roles a few times over the years,” Pearce told Vanity Fair in a new interview. “The first Batman and The Prestige. But 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.'”

A representative for Warner Bros. did not immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly‘s request for comment on Saturday, or respond to Vanity Fair‘s earlier request for comment.

Pearce didn’t seem particularly hurt by the exec’s alleged issue with him, but he was disappointed by the opportunities it might have cost him. “I think he just didn’t believe in me as an actor,” he speculated. “In a way, that’s good to know. I mean, fair enough; there are some actors I don’t get. But it meant I could never work with Chris.”

The actor said he’d been considered for Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins, but the role ultimately went to Liam Neeson. “They flew me to London to discuss the Liam Neeson role for Batman, and I think it was decided on my flight that I wasn’t going to be in the movie,” he recalled. “So I get there and Chris is like, ‘Hey, you want to see the Batmobile and get dinner?'”

Pearce added that he still had a sense of what happened on the set of The Prestige thanks to a friend who worked on the film. “When my friend Piper Perabo was working on The Prestige, I called her to see how it [was] going, and she said, ‘Oh, Chris Nolan, he’s this towering intellectual, a total cinephile, and Christian Bale is all internal and actor-y and method, and then Hugh Jackman is hosting a dinner party,'” he recalled. 

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Although Pearce missed the chance to work on Nolan’s Batman trilogy, he did end up in another billion-dollar comic book movie: He played antagonist Aldrich Killian in 2013’s Iron Man 3, and said he enjoyed working with Robert Downey Jr. because he’s “fantastic at having other actors involved” in the process. “We had more sets and stuff to be on that it didn’t feel too visual effects–laden.”

Pearce has experienced a number of different approaches to big-budget filmmaking. “When I made The Time Machine, that was me in an entirely green studio where at the end of the day I’d have a migraine,” he said. “That was more effects-laden than Iron Man. Or Prometheus. Partially because Ridley Scott doesn’t like visual effects.”

The actor recalled the Gladiator director insisting on actual sets during the production of the Alien prequel. “I remember we were shooting in that massive cave of an arena where our characters first enter that world,” Pearce said. “Ridley wanted it 26 feet longer than it was, and they said, ‘We can put a green screen at the end and make it as long as you want.’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, knock the end of the studio down and build it for me.’ They went, ‘Yes, Mr. Scott, whatever you want, sir.'”