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WHAT is
the sound of one hand clapping? Maybe it’s a little like
the sound of an interview ...with someone who hates
being interviewed.
That’s
kind of what I was afraid of when I signed on to talk to
Guy Pearce, the Australian actor known for the fierce
protection of his privacy, if not his outright antipathy
to the starmaking machinery (complete with the
obligatory prying of the media every time a new movie
comes out). “There’s something I admire about actors who
I don’t know anything about,” he says, sounding almost
wistful.
Speaking
by telephone from
Los Angeles,
where he has flown in from his home down under to
promote First Snow, a drama about a superficial salesman
forced to reassess his life when a psychic (J.K.
Simmons) delivers ominous news, the star of L.A.
Confidential and Memento seems relaxed and chatty. Yet
even as he speaks of his compassion for people in my
position, with newspapers to sell, he hints that he’d
rather be anywhere but here. It’s a feeling he says he
has wrestled with for more than 20 years, ever since his
four-year stint on the late 1980s Aussie soap Neighbours
catapulted him to teen-heartthrob status.
“People
wanted to know everything about us,” Pearce says of the
media’s obsession with his and his cast mates’ private
lives. “I really struggled with it, and I used to get
really aggressive about it. I hated it being intrusive,
and on some level I still really, really do.”
That’s a
bit of a strange thing to hear, especially when you’re
looking down at Pearce’s do-ya-think-I’m-sexy? photo
splashed across the cover of the March issue of Out
magazine, in which Pearce is quoted talking volubly, not
just about his recent performance as Andy Warhol in the
Edie Sedgwick biopic Factory Girl, but about the serious
soul-searching the 39-year-old says he went through,
beginning in 2001, when the mounting pressures of his
job led him to experience something like a “nervous
breakdown.”
“I don’t
think I was [having one],” he says now of the feelings
of overload that drove him to question his very choice
of career, leading him to consider packing it all in and
switching from acting to music. (A longtime
singer-songwriter who is friends with members of the
well-known Aussie bands Silverchair and Jet, Pearce
sometimes sits in as guest singer with the instrumental
group the Unconscious Brothers, formed by his best
friend, organist Tim Neal.) Whatever the diagnosis,
Pearce says, it was clear that “something was going on.”
It was
enough to persuade him to drop out “for, like, a month,”
he remembers, holing up in a remote part of the
Australian desert where he “just kind of sat there and
thought.”
Thought
and, apparently, did a bit of light reading. In the
years leading up to the crisis, “I’d either bought or
I’d been given or I’d found various books on Buddhism
and meditation,” says Pearce, who, far from being
interested in spirituality, describes himself as a
“complete heathen. I’d never taken any notice of them
whatsoever. In the back of my mind, I’d had an interest
in it, I suppose, because it wasn’t the religion that
gets shoved down your throat.”
Long
story short: While he was away, he devoured the stack of
books, in the process teaching himself to meditate in an
effort to stabilize a life he felt was out of balance
between the egoless ideal of Buddhism and the requisite
bravado needed to get up in front of a camera and act
every day.
Oh,
yeah, and giving up smoking all the pot he’d come to
rely on as a crutch didn’t hurt either. “That really
wasn’t helping anything,” he says with a laugh.
So much
for the Greta Garbo I-vant-to-be-alone act I expected at
the top of this interview.
In
conversation, Pearce comes across as refreshingly
candid. To a degree. If anything has changed since his
sojourn in the desert, as he’s quick to point out, it
isn’t his core feeling that members of the entertainment
media sometimes cross the line in their quest for
movie-star dirt. They still do, he says. What’s
different for him today is his ability to handle the
intrusion. “I’ll certainly have my say if I feel like
it’s being crossed,” Pearce says of the invisible line.
What’s more, “I feel like I’m far more articulate and
more honest about” why it shouldn’t be crossed.
Probe a
little too closely, for example, about which of Pearce’s
film roles he might view as mistakes in a career that
even he will admit has had its ups and downs—Ravenous,
anyone? —and he scrupulously avoids naming names. “I
would feel nervous about specifically referring to
[films],” he says, “because I feel like people will look
back and go, ‘Ah- haaa! Yeah, okay.’ “
Hindsight, after all, is 20-20.
Ironically, it’s only The Time Machine, the poorly
received 2002 remake of H.G. Wells’s classic sci-fi
adventure, that Pearce is willing to dissect, describing
his decision to follow other people’s advice (not to
mention the lure of the pile of cash he was offered) as
a watershed moment.
The
failure to listen to his own inner voice—a voice he says
he can hear so much more clearly now that he’s turned
off the radio-like “head noise” that plagued him just a
few short years ago—may well have led him down the path
of fame and fortune, a path that so many of his fellow
actors have been conditioned to seek. In the process,
what he learned was that the path was leading him away
from himself.
“There
were a couple of things in the process that just didn’t
feel right to me, as far as choosing to do it,” he says.
“And I sort of ignored those things, to my own peril.” |
