Guy Pearce
Guy Pearce
Guy Edward Pearceis an Australian actor and musician. He is well known for having starred in the role of Mike Young in the Australian television series Neighbours and in films such as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, L.A. Confidential, Memento, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Road, The King's Speech, Prometheus, and Iron Man 3. In Australian cinema, he has appeared in The Proposition, Animal Kingdom, The Rover, Holding the Manand The Wizards of Aus. He has...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth5 October 1967
CityCambridgeshir, England
Because in Australia we're so inundated with American culture, television, this that and the other, everyone in Australia can do an American accent. It's just second nature.
Australia's not so bad with me, really, people are pretty cool with me at home, but in England it feels a little bit scary.
Most of the time when I'm in Australia I'm not really working, it seems. I'm just at home, getting on with renovating my house or writing music or whatever. So I get back to doing all the stuff that I naturally do. Whereas if I'm away working, that's all there is to do, is to concentrate on the work.
Well, English is no problem for me because I am actually English. My whole family are English; I was brought up listening to various forms of the English accent. Obviously there are more specific ones that get a little bit tricky. Same with American stuff. But because in Australia we're so inundated with American culture, television, this that and the other, everyone in Australia can do an American accent. It's just second nature.
There's many more films being made in America than there are in Australia. You make four hundred and fifty films a year, we make twenty-five.
If I had to choose between a good Australian film and a good international film, I'd definitely choose the good Australian film.
Even though we all speak English here in America, you all speak a very different language. So it's really enjoyable for me to work at home. It's more cathartic, I suppose. To work in America or other places is more about curiosity, because I'm dealing with cultures and sensibilities that I don't really know.
They actually came to me over a year ago, and I was having an ever-so-mild nervous breakdown at that point, and felt I needed to just stop. So I went, "I can't look at anything right now, I need to stop." I wasn't really having a nervous breakdown, I'd just done too much stuff back to back. And so a whole lot of time went by, and they called and said, "Are you ready now to take a look at this script?" So I did and then met with him in the UK.
I've always been resistant to parties and schmoozing.
Ah, we tend to do a lot of that stuff in Australia. We don't really have the money to get anyone else to do it. "We can't afford a stuntman today, so you'll be jumping onto the train." "Right, okay.
Men often still expect women to be under their thumb.
On stage, you've got dialogue you've learned. You've got a paying audience. It couldn't be better, you know?
It's hard to pinpoint why all of a sudden a group of Australian films will be doing well and why they perhaps are better made than some from the past.
There's a bunch of different people that I utilize when we record at home. There's a girl that I'll play with more regularly than anybody else, I suppose. Whenever I go home, she and I try to go and do some little gigs around the place, just the two of us. So, no, I'm not really in a band.