Guy Pearce thought he’d ‘killed’ James Cromwell with gun on LA Confidential set

In the film, there’s a scene where his character shoots Cromwell’s in the back of the head

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.

Cromwell and Pearce in 'LA Confidential' (Warner Bros)

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”.

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“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.