Guy Pearce said he had to separate Rupert Murdoch’s modern reputation from the younger version he played in Ink.
The actor portrayed Murdoch in Danny Boyle’s Netflix adaptation of the stage play, which traced the rise of the British tabloid The Sun. While Pearce and Boyle discussed the media mogul’s later controversies, the performance focused more closely on what drove Murdoch in the late 1960s.
Guy Pearce explains how he approached playing a younger Rupert Murdoch in Danny Boyle’s Netflix drama Ink
Pearce said he and Boyle talked about “who Murdoch has become,” along with public perceptions of him and “the scandals that he’s been through and the effect that he’s had on the media in recent years.”
However, Guy Pearce’s Ink did not center on those later chapters.
Instead, Pearce tried to understand Murdoch at an earlier point in his career, when he took ownership of The Sun.
“At the heart” of the performance, Pearce said, was “what Murdoch was wanting in this early stage.”
He and Boyle focused on Murdoch’s opposition to Britain’s traditional establishment and his belief that newspapers could respond more directly to what readers wanted.
“To get a sense of who Rupert Murdoch was back in ’69 in this early stage, and we talked about his anti-establishment with the British establishment and the effect of that establishment and the way in which it was dictating to the public,” Pearce explained.
The actor said Murdoch appeared to approach newspapers from a different angle.
“Rupert, I think, naturally had an eye on what he thought the public actually wanted, and came from that direction instead,” Pearce said.
Pearce and Boyle also examined Murdoch’s belief that a newspaper could entertain readers as well as inform them.
“And the simple idea that a paper should be informative but also entertaining,” Pearce said. “It shouldn’t just be dry and dull.”
Jack O’Connell played editor Larry Lamb in the film. O’Connell told TheWrap that Boyle helped him focus on Lamb’s obsession with the newspaper’s sales and growth.
The Ink Netflix adaptation screened at the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of its U.S. release later in the year.
For Pearce, playing Rupert Murdoch in Ink meant acknowledging the figure Murdoch later became while concentrating on the ambitions and attitudes that shaped him much earlier.
