“I hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it”: the role that made Guy Pearce fall out of love with acting
If you’re an actor, and you happen to be from Australia, or New Zealand for that matter, the chances that you have at some point appeared on either Neighbours or Home and Away are precisely 99.99%. It’s like the law there or something, and sometimes, actors who appear on one of those shows go on to be proper, actual movie stars, like Guy Pearce.
Pearce was one of the first to make that transition from TV star ‘Down Under’ to Hollywood, followed by luminaries like Chris Hemsworth and Margot Robbie, because he was indeed on Neighbours in the early days, almost as soon as the show started in fact, playing the role of Mike Young, who suited his name very well because he was 18 when he joined.
Neighbours was a massive deal in Australia, and perhaps even more so in Pearce’s native England, where he was born before moving around the world as a child. It meant a huge amount of attention from the public everywhere he went, along with stars from the same soap opera. like Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, but those aren’t experiences that he looks back on fondly.
He told The Telegraph, “We’d go to shopping centres and six trillion fans would turn up. I had a shirt ripped off once. I hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it. I think what I hated was the disconnect between feeling even vaguely decent about what I was doing as an actor, and all the adulation that came with it.”
He spent three years on Ramsay Street before he decided to try his luck at making movies, with his agent paying him to go to the Cannes Film Festival in 1991 to catch the eye of casting directors. It was another three years before the plan paid off, however, when he got his breakthrough role in the drag queen comedy The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert in 1994, and it was that role that really changed things for Pearce forever.
It was an international hit, making 30 times its budget at the box office and earning a host of industry awards, including an Oscar nomination. Pearce was now on the radar of casting directors over in the US, and it resulted in his landing one of the lead roles in one of the most critically acclaimed films of the late 1990s: LA Confidential.
Along with fellow antipodean export (and of course former Neighbours star) Russell Crowe, Pearce lined up as a Los Angeles police detective in the 1950s in the noir tale of corruption and deceit, the film winning two Oscars from a total of nine nominations and becoming a global must-watch.
Pearce has made Hollywood movies ever since, with some highlights including the head-spinning Christopher Nolan thriller Memento, which, if rumours are to be believed, could soon be getting a sequel, and 2024’s epic The Brutalist, which earned him a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ nomination at last year’s Academy Awards.
He’s currently filming a post-apocalyptic new sci-fi from Ridley Scott called The Dog Stars, plus a biopic of Aussie newspaper baron Rupert Murdoch called Ink. In addition to those, he will finally make a sequel to The Adventures of Priscilla, coming more than 30 years after the release of the first film that really launched his career.
