The transition from TV soaps to mainstream movies is a notoriously difficult one. Most actors who attempt it are forced to retire, defeated, to the TV studios from when they briefly emerged. For Guy Pearce, that transition was an even more daunting one, given that he had made his mark in not just one but two internationally popular Australian soap series - Neighbours and Home and Away - neither of which even slightly stretched his abilities and were more likely to prompt condescension or derision than respect and offers of challenging cinema roles.
It took time and patience for Pearce to break the mould, but when the opportunity came - when director Stephan Elliott cast him as the youngest of the three drag queens travelling through Australia in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - Pearce seized upon the potential of the part and invested it with a charm and ingenuousness which had never been evident in the days when he played the cute-but-cardboard schoolteacher Mike Young in Neighbours and Home and Away.
That engaging performance in Priscilla triggered off Pearce's international cinema career as he went on to star in movies as diverse as the hard-boiled detective thriller, LA Confidential; the eerie cannibalism yarn, Ravenous; the US court-martial drama, Rules of Engagement; the mind-bending thriller, Memento; and now, the new version of The Count of Monte Cristo, which finished filming in Ireland last week, before moving on to Maltese locations.
Going on release here next weekend, Memento, directed by the young English filmmaker Christopher Nolan, cleverly and tantalisingly plays with the themes of time, memory, reality and illusion - and with the viewer's brain. It teasingly unravels its twisted tale of a former insurance investigator (played by Pearce) seeking to solve the mystery of his wife's murder, and constrained by a rare condition of short-term memory loss which causes him to forget everything 15 minutes after it happened.
He addresses this perplexing dilemma by shooting and captioning a succession of Polaroids, writing notes to himself and tattooing essential information on his body to remind him of the most relevant information he collects. This visually stylish thriller is dexterously assembled by Nolan as a particularly complex jigsaw and anchored by Pearce's richly enigmatic central performance.
Sitting in his Ballsbridge hotel during a break in shooting from The Count of Monte Cristo, Pearce exudes enthusiasm for Memento, in which he is rarely off-screen. "I prefer that, being on the set every day," he says. "I love being part of the crew, feeling like we're a team working together. On Count of Monte Cristo, I had two weeks off and I have to ask myself, do I now switch back into Guy Pearce-mode and just live my life, or do I try and hang on this image of the film that I am making?"
Memento is one of those rare tantalising movies, like The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects, which encourages the viewer to replay the film in their mind immediately after seeing it, to pull it all together and make complete sense of it. "I fell for Sixth Sense, too," says Pearce. "I'm pretty hopeless at figuring these things out."
Many women, including Pearce's wife, Kate, "solved" The Sixth Sense more quickly than men. It seems they noticed early on that Bruce Willis wore the same costume throughout the film. "My wife turned to me about 10 minutes into The Sixth Sense and she had cracked it," Pearce says. "But I don't look for twists, which is why I get fooled all the time. I know I must be daft, but The Usual Suspects just doesn't make sense to me. I found it frustrating. I need to see it again, I guess."
He finds Memento difficult to talk about, he says, because it is only in watching the film that viewers begin to understand what is being revealed before their eyes. "Anyhow, I'm really crap at describing the characters I play. Chris Nolan sees Memento very much as a noir thriller, using very particular genre aspects like the locations - the bars, the seedy hotels - and yet flipping it on its head then, deconstructing it. That's what I enjoyed most about the film. "When I read the script first, I immediately latched on to the character I was offered. If that doesn't happen, I won't do the film. Because I tend to focus on that a bit too much, I always feel the need to go back to the script a second time to then look at the whole story. So I tend to remember a script in a rather fragmented, erratic form, but I'll remember the emotions of the character and I'll know whether or not I can play that character.
"When I went back over the script of Memento, I pulled it apart and read it in its linear form - the colour stuff and the black-and-white sequences - to see the logic of it all and to feel confident about that aspect of it and put it aside then and concentrate on my performance."
He describes Christopher Nolan, the writer and director of Memento, as "very eloquent, very bright, very literary. He's got an incredible capacity for remembering detail and for projecting an image and then visualising that entire image.
"I have no time for directors who don't include actors all the way in the process, like those who think they're being innovative when they say, `I don't want you to know this, because I want it to be a surprise to you when you see it'. I say, `No, we're making a movie. Give me the credit for having the ability to act surprised.' "
Now 33, Guy Pearce got his first taste of acting in a school play when he was nine. The son of a test pilot and a schoolteacher, he was born in England and lived there for three years before his family moved to Australia, where he was raised in Torquay, an hour's drive south of Melbourne. "I grew up on the beach," he says. "They hold the World Surfing Championships there and I still do a lot of surfing there when I'm at home. Melbourne is still very much my home."
Growing up, his biggest passion apart from surfing was body-building and he admired Arnold Schwarzenegger enormously, long before Arnie moved into movies. Like his idol, Pearce entered body-building competitions and won the title of Junior Mr Victoria when he was 16. Before he landed his role in Neighbours, Pearce's acting experience amounted to school plays, some amateur theatre, a 20-minute, student short film and a Mars bar commercial. He auditioned for Neighbours, got the part, did his final exams at school on a Friday and started on the show the following Monday.
At the height of his popularity in Neighbours, he toured around promoting the show, making several visits to children's clubs in Ireland - in Dublin and Dungannon - in 1990. "I did one appearance at this club in Dublin, an entertainment centre where a couple of thousand kids turned up," he recalls. "There was a disco and then I came in and talked to them and answered their questions. It was crazy with all the screaming."
He landed several roles in Australian movies which didn't travel very far - including a botched biopic in which he played the young Errol Flynn - before Stephan Elliott cast him in Priscilla. "The most flattering thing for me is that so many people couldn't believe this was the same person who was on Neighbours and Home and Away," he says. "They thought it was such a risk for me to take, but I didn't see it as a risk at all. I felt it was a great deal of fun and such an interesting story.
"I'm a bit narrow-minded about people's perception of me. I'm always wondering about it and questioning it. I like to think that I can wander around anonymously and pop up in different things. I couldn't understand how some people seemed bewildered that I went into Priscilla and then on to LA Confidential. I'm just an actor who likes to play a wide variety of characters. I find it really tedious to see those actors who are playing the same kind of role over and over again. That's not for me."
Director Curtis Hanson imaginatively chose Pearce and another fast-rising Australia-based actor, the New Zealand-born Russell Crowe, for two of the key roles in LA Confidential. "I think we were definitely a good balance in it," says Pearce. "I think Curtis saw something about us that just worked. Russell is like me, really. He's a moody bastard - and most actors are, I guess. He's very talented, very specific about what he wants and he understands the film-making process very well. So, essentially, he's the perfect person to work with.
`I think Australians are very practical, like Irish people. We don't have much money to make films, so we have to put in time thinking out how they're going to work, rather than just throwing money at it. In America, if there's a problem on a film set and everyone's standing around scratching their heads, someone calls the studio and asks for more money."
Back in Ireland for The Count of Monte Cristo, is he still recognised on the streets as much as when he was in Neighbours? "Vaguely, but it's not like it used to be 10 years ago," he says. "I have had a good time here. When my wife was here we were going out quite a bit, checking out the place. I find the tourist thing a bit difficult, though, and I can't really enjoy a city when you have millions of other people wandering around and knocking you out of the way, trying to enjoy it as well."
In Kevin Reynolds's new film of The Count of Monte Cristo, Pearce plays the duplicitous Fernand Modego who betrays his best friend, Edmond Dantes, played by Jim Caviezel from The Thin Red Line and Frequency. "This is only the third big studio film I've done," says Pearce. "I don't consider LA Confidential to be a big studio film because it was quite an intimate experience. I generally find that the bigger the movie, the more lost I feel in the whole process. All this detail and the specifics of personality and emotion tend to be turned into something a little generic. Whereas a film like Memento is all about detail and subtlety, Monte Cristo is more about the big picture.
"I've enjoyed playing Fernand Mondego. He's not a very nice guy. But like every actor who plays a villain, I'd like to think he's complex enough to force the audience to have some sympathy for him, or at least to question why he's doing what he's doing, while not necessarily justifying what he's doing. But in the end, I desperately want people to despise this character."
Before The Count of Monte Cristo hits our screens next year, Pearce will be seen in two completed pictures. He co-stars with Helena Bonham Carter in Till Human Voices Wake Us, which he describes as "a small Australian film in which I play a psychoanalyst who is leading a fairly repressed life and is dragged back into the country by the death of his father. While he's up there, all his childhood memories return, including the death of a schoolfriend, which he has never really dealt with. It's a lovely, small, intimate story."
Then there is the US indie production, A Slipping Down Life, whose release has been delayed since it surfaced at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1999. "There's a bit of trouble in the camp," Pearce explains. "The producer took it upon herself to reedit the movie because they didn't sell it straight away at Sundance. She's done this new version of the film, but we all still support the director's version, so there's a bit of a stalemate going on."
He plays a singer in the film. "I love singing," he says. "I've got a studio at home and I record a lot of music - folky, rocky, the usual stuff." But he insists he was never tempted to jump on the bandwagon when his fellow Neighbours stars, Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, were bursting into song and topping the charts in their TV heyday.
"I feel I have a much more cynical view of soap stars who become pop stars," he says with a wry smile. "My approach to music is very different, and I've never been interested in doing trite pop music." But it proved very lucrative for Kylie and Jason. "Yeah," Pearce grins, "but so is robbing a bank."
Memento opens at selected cinemas on Friday