In the new movie Memory, Liam Neeson plays Alex, an expert assassin who refuses to complete a job for a criminal organization and ends up becoming a target and with both the organization and the authorities in pursuit, Alex has to try to stay ahead except there’s a problem: he’s losing his memory. The film also stars Guy Pearce and for Pearce, this isn’t his first film about memory loss. The actor starred in Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film Memento, playing Leonard Shelby, a man with short-term memory loss and the inability to form new memories searching for the people who attacked him and killed his wife. Now, Pearce explains why stories about memory loss appeal to him.
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“Well, it’s just immediately about your identity. I mean we all take for granted all the things that we know in our lives, that sort of culminate into an identity that is us,” Pearce told ComicBook.com. “So, as soon as you take that away, you take your knowledge, you take your history away, then what are we? What’s left? And it’s interesting, particularly in this case with Liam’s character who is, you know, clearly established from the outset as a hitman. So, there’s sort of moral questions there and even though he’s losing his memory, I mean, he’s clearly a man who has questionable morals anyway. But the thing that rises to the surface, even in the face of losing one’s memory is one’s moral compass. So, there’s something interesting about that. That’s what I found interesting about the script. Obviously, it’s a very different kind of memory loss to my character in Memento, but memory loss is memory loss. Once their stories go, then they go.”
Of course, stories about memory aren’t the only stories that interest Pearce. The actor also revealed that he’d be very much interested in returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe if the opportunity presented itself. Pearce played Iron Man 3 villain Aldrich Killian, and while the character did appear to die pretty horribly in the film the circumstances around his death — namely the Extremis process — does leave the door slightly open.
“I’d be very much interested to see him come back,” Pearce said. “And I think because of the nature of the character is that he is, it’s totally conceivable that he could come back. So yes, I would love to see what he is up to as well. Because he’s somebody, obviously as we saw in Iron Man 3, who went through a sort of rapid vast change from the beginning of the story. So, who knows where he’s ended up.”
Memory, starring Neeson, Pearce, Monica Bellucci, Harold Torres, Taj Atwal, and Ray Fearon, opens in theaters on April 29th.
