It’s hard to pick a favourite Guy Pearce role over his nearly 40-year career, but let’s try. Perhaps it’s drag queen Felicia Jollygoodfellow in his 1994 breakout Australian movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, or Detective Exley in 1997’s LA Confidential.
Maybe you prefer your Pearce going backwards in Christopher Nolan’s Memento; time-travelling back to 1899 in an adaptation of HG Wells’s The Time Machine; at sea in The Count of Monte Cristo; or all-too-briefly at war in The Hurt Locker. He’s also done royal drama (The King’s Speech, Mary Queen of Scots) and he’s done biopics (Andy Warhol in Factory Girl and Harry Houdini in Death Defying Acts). He’s been into space (Prometheus and Alien: Covenant) and he’s breathed fire (Iron Man 3).
He’s made two Aussie westerns with John Hillcoat (Lawless, The Proposition) and two yet gnarlier contemporary tales set in his homeland (Animal Kingdom, The Rover). And earlier this year he was Oscar-nominated for his role as a wealthy industrialist in The Brutalist. He didn’t win the Academy Award, but he made a lot of new fans with his candour about marriage, Palestine, and his feelings about LA Confidential co-star Kevin Spacey.
Pearce also won an Emmy for his role in the Todd Haynes miniseries Mildred Pierce, and was excellent in Mare of Easttown – both opposite Kate Winslet. He released two solo albums in the 2010s, and dresses up as a dishevelled superhero in the video to Razorlight’s Before I Fall to Pieces. But, of course, there are some of us who will never get beyond thinking of him as good old Mike from Neighbours – a role to which he returned with winning welly in the finale-that-wasn’t-a-finale.
Now Pearce returns as a soon-to-be-paroled inmate in hard-hitting prison drama Inside, for which he has excitingly agreed to take the reader interview chair. There’s plenty to ask the actor. Was he really second choice behind Christian Bale for Batman? Does he claim to be Australian or English? (Pearce was born in England but moved to Australia when he was three.) Can anyone – let alone he – remember the name of the character he played in Home and Away? Or the name of the No 156 single he released in 1989? Why does he think that he’s “shit” in Memento? And how are his knees these days?
Please get your questions in by 6pm this Sunday, 20 July, and we’ll print his answers in Film & Music and online on 1 August.
• Inside is out on digital, DVD and Blu-ray on 11 August
