Guy Pearce weighs in on possible return to Neighbours

Aussie actor Guy Pearce opens up about the surprise resurrection of Neighbours and whether he’ll be returning to Ramsay Street.

Guy Pearce says he doesn’t quite know what to make of the miraculous resurrection of Neighbours.

The Aussie actor is one of the most celebrated and successful alumni of the long-running soapie, having made his mark on the world stage in movies such as LA Confidential and The King’s Speech as well as TV roles in Mildred Pierce, A Christmas Carol and Mare of Easttown.

He was also widely regarded as the standout of the farewell episode in July, when his character Mike Young touchingly reunited with his 1990s love interest, Annie Jones’s Jane Harris. Pearce says that one of the main reasons he agreed to the nostalgic finale was to be able to play the father of his friend Henrietta Graham’s character and to close the chapter on something that “really holds a special place in my heart”. So the announcement last month that Amazon had acquired the show and plans to restart production early next year left him a little nonplussed.

“I’m very pleased for everybody that it’s coming back,” he says. “But at the same time it is sort of weird, isn’t it, when you get ready to finish something and then it’s alive again. We’ve got to figure out what that means for everybody I suppose.”

Does that then leave the door open for another return to Ramsay St or would they have to threaten to cancel it again to entice him back?

“I don’t know,” he says with a laugh. “It’s too hard to say – it’s all too hypothetical at the moment.”

Guy Pearce as Mike Young and Annie Jones as Jane Harris in the Neighbours finale.

Between the Neighbours finale, his beloved Geelong Cats winning the AFL Grand Final (he watched on his computer from New Zealand where he was filming, and then swapped celebratory texts with his mates on the team for weeks afterwards) and making Aussie drama The Clearing, it’s been a typically busy year for the prolific and eclectic Pearce.

His action-drama with Liam Neeson, Memory, is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video, and psychological-thriller The Infernal Machine is available to rent or buy on digital. The rave-reviewed espionage drama A Spy Among Friends – in which he plays real-life English double agent Kim Philby – is available to stream on BritBox from today.

Pearce says he didn’t know much about Philby when approached to play the part but was familiar with the so-called Cambridge Five, a ring of UK agents who passed on information to the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1950s. A Spy Among Friends, based on the bestseller written by Ben Macintyre, focuses on Philby’s bond with MI6 intelligence officer Nicholas Elliott (played by Damien Lewis) and how it unravels in the lead-up to his defection to the USSR in 1963.

“It was interesting to view it through that prism,” Pearce says of the close friendship between the two men. “We, as an audience, relate to the story because it’s about the betrayal of a friendship, as well as of course, the betrayal of the country, which brings it into a far more relatable and intimate world. Any of us would ask the question, ‘what is it like to be lied to by a friend?’- not just once, but for 30 odd years.”

Guy Pearce as Kim Philby in the spy drama A Spy Among Friends

Having taken the part, Pearce threw himself into the wealth of material that has been written about suave, debonair Philby as well as archival footage including a famous 1955 TV interview in which he calmly maintained his innocence as the “third man” after fellow double agents Anthony Burgess and Donald Maclean had their covers blown and fled to Moscow. One of his most valuable sources was the book written by Philby’s third wife Eleanor Brewer, whom he left in Beirut when he fled behind the Iron Curtain. Brewer eventually joined him there, although the relationship foundered soon after, as Philby became more and more disillusioned with the Communism he professed to admire and eventually drank himself to death.

“In that book, she refers to and quotes from the letters that he wrote to her,” Pearce says. “There was something very intimate and personal about that, which I found to be the most valuable in a way because that’s the detail-y stuff.”

Pearce is no stranger to bringing historical figures to life on screen having played Errol Flynn, Andy Warhol, Harry Houdini, King Edward VIII, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Cecil in the past. But while he’s conscious of portraying them accurately and using whatever information is available, he says there are fundamental similarities to playing a fictional character.

Actor Guy Pearce chats with Cats players at training ahead of this year’s AFL Grand Final. Picture: Alan Barber

“As soon as I read a script and it’s about a real person I can’t wait to start Googling them to get a sense of them,” he says. “Because in the same way that I read a script about a fictional character, I’m trying to find something to latch on to. And sometimes that comes immediately on the first page. I’m like, ‘wow, I’ve got this person’. I can see them and I can apply them right now. And other times, there’s a whole lot of work that has to be done and variations in between. So of course, if it was a real person, or a fictional character, ultimately, I’ve got to find the truth of that character.”

Since his breakthrough Hollywood role in LA Confidential, Pearce has appeared in his fair share of big blockbusters from Iron Man 3 to the Alien prequel, Prometheus and as Vin Diesel’s nemesis in Bloodshot. But he’s just as at home – if not more so – on a smaller, more cerebral film such as The Infernal Machine, made on a tiny budget and with barely a special effect in sight. In it, he plays a writer of a book that inspires a horrific event and whose life unravels after he is tracked down by a disturbed fan.

“When you look at any kind of psychological thriller, if you feel the hairs standing on the back of your neck and you feel yourself clamming up as you read it then I know that it’s got me in,” he says. “I don’t need big explosions and stuff going on around me to feel like we can tell a story. I think there’s so much going on in all of us internally.”

A Spy Among Friends is now available to stream on BritBox.

Originally published as Guy Pearce weighs in on possible return to Neighbours