OUR NICE GUY’S BACK IN TOWN

Pearce performs new album in double act

AHEAD of Guy Pearce’s homecoming show at GPAC tonight, the actor-turned-musician credited Geelong’s youth theatre as the “window to the world” he now lives in.

Growing up in Hamlyn Heights from the age of four before moving to Torquay briefly as a teenager with his mum and sister, the former Geelong College student had his first taste of the spotlight with GSODA Junior Players.

The Cats fan praised the Geelong community for supporting the GPAC redevelopment to improve disability access, which resonated with Pearce whose older sister, Tracey, has an intellectual disability.

“Anybody with a disability is fighting to have their voice heard and to have the environment work for them, and to see anyone else from the community join them in that I think is incredibly valuable,” he said.

“It’s really meaningful for me to come back and play on that big stage again.”

Looking back to the beginning of his career, the 47-year-old admitted his time on Neighbours and his 1994 breakout role, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, came before he had even decided to be a professional actor.

“I never actually said, ‘Yep, I’m going to give acting a serious shot’,” he said.

“I had been doing plays and shows ever since I was a little kid and that kept seguing from one project to the next.

“I kept going on like that and probably when I was 30 I went, ‘Hang on a second, I’m living my life based on the decision of an eight-year-old’.”

He paused for self reflection, taking a two-year break to assess his skills and look at the validity of acting, what it meant to him and others, and came to a conclusion that would see him star in the likes of Memento, The King’s Speech, Prometheus and The Proposition.

In talking about his impressive career, Pearce was torn between deciding whether his highlights were the films that were a great experience on set but “didn’t get seen by anybody”, or the ones that were hard to work on but box office successes.

He credited professional and personal integrity, along with a foreseeable end date, for getting him through difficult projects that used up all his energy just to get through the day.

“All I can do when I look back is go, ‘Did I do a good job or not?’ Did I push through and was I professional and did I have self-preservation?

“Also, on a personal level, I don’t want people to come up to me 10 years later and go, ‘That was a horrible performance’, and I say, ‘Well I was grumpy and uninspired’. I don’t want to put myself through that humiliation.”

His latest collaboration is a musical one, with Powderfinger’s Darren Middleton who has also recently launched his solo career with his album Translations.

While Pearce was initially against being seen as “another actor making music” he began to see the importance of getting songs out of his system after more than 25 years of writing them.

After plenty of encouragement, last November he released Broken Bones with 10 tracks he felt worked best together.

In a pairing that Pearce said was not as unlikely as people kept saying, he and Middleton put a band together and named themselves The Octobers after realising all six of them were born in October.

Tickets can still be bought at gpac.org.au for tonight’s Broken/Translations show, in which the pair will share the stage and perform songs from their solo debut albums.