Cassowary Crossing

WHO IS THAT GUY?
A journey through the previous selves of Guy Pearce

(c) David Astle

A guy is dangling upside-down in a bayside Melbourne park. His legs are locked around the monkey bars, his arms folded, his head just inches from the tanbark. Naturally, the parents of local kids are concerned. Who exactly is this man? What’s he doing? He’s been hanging there for almost an hour.

Mums and Dads, please, relax. The mystery man is Guy Pearce, an actor of good character. In fact his bat-like hours – spent across early 2006 – were in the name of studying character, as Pearce takes character seriously. His latest role, in a movie due out this month, is the all-dangling, all-daring escapologist Harry Houdini.

“I like being physical,” Pearce admits, his 40-year-old body chiseled proof. “Physicality is how I can find the character, more so than sitting round a table and talking about it for three days.”

Dangling in suburbia was just one Houdini art that Pearce mastered for Death Defying Acts, a delicate love story directed by fellow Australian Gillian Armstrong. Another trick was breathing:

“I can hold my breath now for two and a half minutes. There’s this technique I learnt from a deep-sea diver on the set, where you hold your lips tight together…” The actor purses. “You create a vacuum.” He re-purses. “And slowly expel all the carbon dioxide…” The demo expels my notes off the table. “And that increases the oxygen capacity in your lungs, breathing that way before you go underwater.”

The technique worked miracles. When studio staff chained him and tossed him into the pool at Pinewood studios west of London – the scene of many an historical 007 stunt – our Guy was primed to survive. Sixty seconds, seventy, eighty, he surfaced in style. Yet such feats fall second in the film to the romance at play between Houdini and a pseudo-psychic, played by Catherine Zeta Jones.

“She’s a delight. I mean Catherine is Hollywood royalty, but underneath she’s a real dag. We put her on this pedestal, but when she steps down it’s a real relief. Filming in England, an Aussie director, she was in her element. She’d wear this glitzy clothes and sparkly sandals and just laugh about them.”

I question Pearce about his own pedestal, but Houdini escapes the rap. “One day Catherine comes on set saying she’s tired. She was out the whole day playing golf with Michael [Douglas] and [Bill] Clinton, and I’m thinking – OK, this is another world. I’d spent the night watching pay TV, watching Geelong go round on Friday Night Footy.”

Low-key is the Guy Pearce way: the stubble and the self-deprecating humour; the T-shirt, jeans, Converse shoes. A single ring, one watch. Only this month the last kiss-curl, a legacy of the Houdini perm, has escaped Pearce’s blond-tipped, which-way hair.

Adjectives linked to Pearce include jut-jawed, dashing, sculpted – even chiseled – but the quality alive inside that lean frame is honesty. Glass-blue eyes, magnified by (“just for reading”) horn-rims, suggest Matinee Idol 101. But the deeper thing is candour, and possibly the unease that brings.

So many of his roles – a viperfish drag queen, a puritan cop, Andy Warhol – come with an inbuilt restlessness. And restlessness, funnily enough, sits quite comfortably with the actor. “I don’t act because I’m some supremely confident being. I don’t want to be that guy. There are leading men who tell producers ‘I do my thing. Do you want me or not in your movie?’” Guy shakes his head. “I still see acting as getting into character.”

That’s my cue to dig out the photos. One way to study the Pearce Paradox is via his multiple selves. What follows, each film shot landing on the table, will mirror the ordeal of Leonard Shelby. For those who forget, Shelby (Pearce) is the tattooed amnesiac of Memento, a troubled soul sweating on Polaroids to map his hazy past. Harry Houdini may defy locks and chains, but will Guy Pearce survive a drag down Memory Lane?

Mike Young, Neighbours, 1986-89 – Guy’s first previous life, on screen at least, belongs to a mullet-mopped kid called Mike, the hunky young teacher adored by thousands in Australia, and millions in the UK.

Aged 17, Pearce put down his pen for his last Year 12 exam in 1986, and walked onto the Neighbors set the following week. A life in front of cameras came easily; fandom’s delirium was the greater shock. “At some shopping centre, doing a promotion, I remember a fan grabbing my Midnight Oil T-shirt and the whole thing ripped off. I’m glad those days have died down a bit.”

Despite ranking high on viewers’ spunk-o-meter, the actor is quick to scorn lead billing. “Even when I was supposed to be the guy I wasn’t really the guy, Jason [Donovan] was the guy and I was one of the other guys,” says Guy.

The soap stint cautioned Pearce against cheap-won celebrity. “It didn’t make sense to me. Even Bouncer the dog was just as chased by fans as we were. It wasn’t about our work, but something else – and that something makes me anxious. I did my share of hibernating after all that.”

Felicia Jollygoodfellow (aka Adam Whitely), Priscilla, 1994 – Guy’s father Stuart, a Kiwi test pilot, was killed when his twin-prop Nomad crashed at Avalon Airport, close to the Pearce home of Geelong. That was 1975. Guy was 8. “Just being brought up with Mum [Anne] and a sister [Tracy, who’s intellectually disabled], I didn’t have that male balance I suppose – and I naturally absorb the people around me.”

Pearce pauses. “I might have been a girlie boy if Dad wasn’t around anyway.” And then in a gruffer voice: “’Take that dress off son!’” The laughter is wicked. Later I observe aloud how Pearce is prettier than handsome, and it’s Felicia’s voice which simpers back: “Thank you darling.”

Felicia J was amazingly attainable in Guy’s psyche, an off-the-peg Other. (“I am more geared towards communicating on a female level.”) The toxic sylph in bodice and beehive was everything Mike from Ramsay Street wasn’t. “It was a great relief to jump clear of Neighbours,” he confesses. In the process, Pearce jumped from hot new teacher to hot new property.

Detective Lieutenant Ed Exley, LA Confidential, 1997 – Curtis Hanson, the director cast this promising kid from Geelong on the strength of his auditions and “his willingness to be an uptight hypocrite.”

Another director, The Proposition’s John Hillcoat, cites Pearce “as a control freak trying to break out.” The actor has to agree. Only this morning he’d arrived at the café early, ensuring hen secured the quiet table for our chat. “Even Hugo Weaving called me a control freak, so it must be true.”

But back to the photos. “1997 was a big year,” he admits. “I turned 30, I got married, and LA Confidential came out.” His wife Kate Mestitz is the anchor in Guy’s life. Back in primary school – “for like five minutes – we held hands” – Guy and Kate were sweethearts. “We spent more time chatting on the phone.” Since high school, and a ten-year gap, the mates re-met, and marriage followed.

A psychologist , Mestitz spends most of her time in Melbourne completing a Masters. She sends her husband regular bars of Cadbury to ease the homesickness. Child-free, the couple dote over Zelda and Lulu, a pair of Egyptian hunting hounds.

“Kate is honest and smart. Sometimes I get her to read stuff. We discuss the script – is this or that clear? What sense do you get? I might read a script think ‘great idea’ but tonally I’m not so sure. Kate will then read it and say ‘a little corny don’t you think?’ Yeah, that was my worry….”

Leonard Shelby, Memento, 2000 – “After Memento I started to question my own memory. Do I remember my dad, physically, or is that from a photo or a story Mum would tell?”

Much like Leonard, the film’s amnesiac relying on Polaroids to map his hazy past, Guy caught a plane with a photo album. “I went on a pilgrimage to New Zealand a few years ago making a little doco for myself, interviewing relatives and Dad’s sisters. I wanted to get away just from Mum’s perspective of him.”

To a younger Guy, charged with being the family’s male, the co-carer and protector, a distant hero for a father was a far greater burden. “I didn’t really get the choice to be responsible,” as he recalls his evaporating childhood, “I was just told that I was.” A dutiful son in an absent father’s shadow.

“If you have somebody up on a pedestal you’re trying to live up to that. And if you can’t, you get insecure.”

Thankfully the pilgrimage yielded a fuller picture of his dad. “I wanted to hear if Dad was ever a prick. Or if he lied or broke something.” The questions provoked fond and human answers among the Pearce clan. “My overall impression was that Dad was a guy’s guy.”

Fernand Mondego, The Count of Monte Cristo, 2002 – Much to his agent’s horror, Pearce has knocked back several ‘comic book roles’ such as X-Men, Daredevil and The Matrix, what the actor calls “rubber-suited shit”. (The one textured role he regrets not snaring is Mr Ripley – which went to Mr Matt Damon.)

“If I do play an extremely evil character, I need them to be well observed,” he says of the scheming Mondego. “Sometimes it’s too easy just being a Good Guy or a Bad Guy. It’s too much like a video game.”

Your average actor would covet a swashbuckler gig with a black hat and sword, plus a fat cheque at duel’s end, but Pearce is not your average guy. Monte Cristo nearly did him in, coupled with his other megabuck movie:

Alexander Hartdegen, The Time Machine, 2002 – “That was tricky. It went on for so long…” with director Simon Wells withdrawing due to stress along the way. (Panned, the flick would struggle to recoup its $80 million outlay.) “Me and Dave the camera operator would make jokes during the shoot, guessing the age of the audience. After one ridiculous scene [fighting a monster called an Uber-Morlock 800,000 years in the future] I’d look across and Dave would say ‘Nine’….and a few weeks later, ‘Seven’.”

As matters grew messier, Pearce succumbed to “head noise”. Come the final shoot, the Aussie decamped the studio machine for home. “The whole thing felt like overload. Around that time I smoked more marijuana than the entire country put together. I went by myself to Cape Levenque [in the Kimberley] to sort myself out.”

He lugged around 30 books about Buddhism (“stuff I’d got hold of over time”) and his guitar. But the guitar was soon ditched (“this wasn’t about being creative”) in favour of meditation. “I needed to stabilise myself. To learn how to concentrate, to breathe.”

So if concentration is new, what was Pearce doing before then? “I would act like I was concentrating. Even at school I’d do great concentration. Teachers thought I was smart but I was just acting.”

Charlie Burns, The Proposition, 2005 – In many ways this outback outlaw, a Christ figure armed with six-shooter, was Guy’s break-back role. After a self-enforced lull, the actor was back on his horse.

“Every film-maker wants his or her work to stand out, but that can only happen if everybody is on the same page. Sometimes that can happen accidentally.”

Or with sheer intent, as Pearce lists the elements vital to any project: story-telling, casting, cinematography, honest score. Then of course there’s the outback. “We filmed in Winton for nine weeks. The heat was the major factor….and the enormous sky. But for me the spirit of the place – the aboriginality – was overwhelming on a daily basis.”

Off-screen, Pearce loves his music. Did he glean any lyrical insight from the film’s script- and songwriter, Nick Cave? “He talked about maintaining a sense of humour. We all know his music can be dark, but there’s a lightness or perhaps a clarity in his perspective that enables listeners to take on his work over and over.” Any jamming? “I might leave that for next time round.”

Andy Warhol, Factory Girl 2006 –Shock-wigged, blotch-faced, Pearce plays a sublime Warhol. His soft Pittsburgh vowels alone are exquisite, the upshot of listening to umpteen hours of the artist in conversation.

But the accent almost faltered on-set, thanks to Pearce’s sponge-like nature. “We were filming in Louisiana, pretending Shreveport was New York City. And I found my soft Pennsylvanian accent was getting lost. I’d started soaking up all the voices of the crew. The only way to escape was listening to Andy on my iPod.”

Which leads us back to the Great Escaper himself. In order to match Houdini’s natural heft, Pearce had gained 20 kilos before the shoot – “good kilos” as they say in sport, a muscle load he’s since pared back, ready for the next onslaught. Though a gentle return to a gym routine “certainly keeps up the appetite”.

By now the quiet table is getting noisy, the lunch crowd creeping in. Guy watches the photos disappearing, all his prior life forms arranged in a stack and says, “My desire is to be different from film to film. People say ‘is that what you’re trying to carve out?’ And I go ‘No, it’s just what I’m interested in.’ But I love the idea of someone going to the movies, seeing a performance and saying ‘who’s that guy?”

[Sunday Life, March 2008]