Guy Pearce

Without ever becoming a regular above-the-title star, Guy Pearce (birthname: Guy Edward Pearce) has a distinctively star-like presence on screen, creating a strong body of work over three decades. With his jaw-jutting good looks and striking intelligence, Pearce has balanced an active resume in both Hollywood and his home country of Australia.

He got out of the gate as an actor early, starring in the popular Aussie sitcom, Neighbours straight from high school. But it was his turn as the flamboyant drag queen Felicia Jollygoodfellow in the hit The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, that brought Pearce to Hollywood’s attention.

Pearce made the most of it, landing a coveted role in Curtis Hanson’s Los Angeles crime epic, L.A. Confidential (1997), followed by powerful work in Antonia Bird’s Western, Ravenous (1999), William Friedkin’s Rules of Engagement (2000) with Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson, and memorably, in Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), which, for some, remains Pearce’s greatest performance.

Guy Pearce has shown a knack for working in major, prestige productions, including several Oscar-winning movies: Katheryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2009), The King’s Speech (2010) with Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, and two stunning turns with director John Hillcoat: The Proposition (2005) and the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2009).

Despite his contemporary look, Guy Pearce has thrived in period work in a wide range of genres, from literary (John Logan’s The Time Machine (2000) and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Genius (2016)), to recent pop history (as Andy Warhol in Factory Girl (2006)), to Westerns (David Michod’s The Rover (2014), Brimstone (2016)), WW2 (The Catcher Was a Spy (2018)), to British royal drama (The King’s Speech and Mary Queen of Scots (2018)).

He has also been a regular in Ridley Scott’s recent sci-fi epics, including Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017). Pearce remains a natural and heavily recruited actor for action thrillers, most recently in Spinning Man (2018) with Pierce Brosnan, and Memory (2022) with Liam Neeson and Monica Bellucci.