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
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. So I'm having to sort of investigate them, which I'm fascinated in, but it comes from a place of curiosity rather than a real need to get something out of my system.
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.
Working on films where the money's more important than the creativity, I just get a bit freaked out by that. I just don't feel comfortable.
I have real dilemmas at times in trying to understand what I really think about the things that are in films and how people respond to them. I flip back and forth from going, "It's a slice of life. This happens in life. A film is an artistic venture. It's expressing life, so why not?
I haven't done too many big American movies, really, have I? Well, I've a couple, I suppose. I certainly haven't done as many as I could have done.
The funny thing is, because I was doing a lot of theater when I was a kid, and a lot of that was musical theater, as I got older I became more interested in acting as a separate entity and music as a separate entity, like songwriting and production and recording and playing music.
There's a sense of humor within the Australian culture that prevails when one is in a rather difficult situation.