Guy Pearce set for surprise return in Neighbours reboot

Guy Pearce is set to return to Ramsay Street when the rebooted Neighbours airs later this year.

The Emmy Award-winning actor helped send the show off with a bang last July when he reprised the role of Mike Young, the character he played in more than 450 episodes between 1986 and 1989, for what was meant to be the long-running soap’s finale after 37 years on air.

The return of Mike Young (Guy Pearce) provided the finale of Neighbours with much of its narrative spine.Credit: Network 10

Reconnecting with old flame Jane Harris (Annie Jones), Pearce’s Mike played a major role in the final three episodes (screened in one movie-length block), and by the end had bought a house and returned to Ramsay Street.

It was a gesture of enormous goodwill from an actor whose career has soared since he made his debut on the show as a 17-year-old novice. But when Amazon and Ten announced they had joined forces to revive the show just four months later, Pearce’s generosity came back to bite him.

“I was a little thrown by that,” Pearce said, in an interview recorded for the Good Weekend Talks podcast. “Annie and I called each other, ‘what do we do now, because we’re living in the street’,” he said, referring to Jones, who returned to the show in 2020 after her own extended period away.

“And she said, ‘well I’m all right because I’m on the show anyway, but what are you going to do?’ I said, ‘I don’t know’. So we’re in the process of working it out.”

The Neighbours finale saw a rekindling of the romance between Mike and Jane (Annie Jones) that dated back to the show’s second season.

Asked if viewers could expect to see him return, Pearce said, “you may, you may” before making it clear they in fact would.

“Obviously, if I’m going to extricate myself from the show, I want to do it respectfully,” he said. “I wasn’t just gonna go, ‘well, bad luck. You had your chance, that was it’, you know. So there may be a little appearance or two, shall we say.”

Asked if it felt like he had been ambushed, and if the familiar suburban court where the show is set was beginning to fell like a career cul de sac, Pearce laughed.

“It’s the gift that keeps on giving, as they say.

“It’s all right,” he added. “I’m happy to be there.”

In a revealing interview for Good Weekend Talks, Pearce also shared his thoughts on becoming a father after long believing he didn’t ever want to have children, his unconventional relationship with Dutch actress Carice Van Houten, his thoughts on playing second fiddle versus leading man, and the curious story of The Family, the weird Melbourne cult that inspired his new project, the Disney+ drama The Clearing.

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