HOLLYWOOD (Zap2it.com, KRT) — Guy Pearce is blonde and jet-lagged when he sits down to an interview in the new Hollywood complex where the Academy Awards are going to be handed out in a few weeks. The 34-year-old Australian actor isn’t too concerned that critics think that he was robbed of an Oscar nomination for his role as a tattooed amnesiac in the cult indie hit “Memento” this past year.
“Do I think the early release of “Memento” hurt the film? Well, I think it’s ironic that people should forget about that film,” he smiles and sighs. “I’m the last person to talk about that, I haven’t seen any of the films.”
Then, he concedes, “I’m a big Sean Penn fan (nominated for “I am Sam”), but then I don’t know what it means to win one.”
He’s looking like his blonde character in “Memento” (a film nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing), because he just finished playing the roguish Chance Wayne in Tennessee Williams’ “Sweet Bird of Youth,” in an Australian theater, and it was “important for me to be suntanned and blond, beach-boy, gigolo-looking,” he smiles. “I haven’t had the chance to dye it out yet.”
If he had his preference, he’d wear his hair longer, like he has it in “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “The Time Machine” and his next film with “Six Feet Under’s” Rachel Griffith, “The Hard Word.”
“I must admit, I always prefer to have long hair, but I never usually get a chance to do it because it’s always getting cut off for a job.”
He got to wear lots of fabulous wigs in “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” which first got him high praise in 1994 for playing a bitchy, gaudy drag queen, and “The Count” was a wig, but he’s more noted for his short hair — like the slicked-back look he had as a straight-laced cop in “L.A. Confidential.” In that one, he co-starred with now-Oscar-winner Russell Crowe.
Pearce has obviously taken the more eclectic film route, doing things like the odd cannibal period-film “Ravenous” in 1999 while Crowe has gone on to do “Gladiator” and “A Beautiful Mind.” But now, Pearce is becoming a household name, and he’s taking on one of the most beloved characters in sci-fi history, the Time Traveler in H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine.”
The film co-stars Dublin singer Samantha Mumba, Orlando Jones, Jeremy Irons and Mark Addy and is directed by the novelist’s great-grandson Simon Wells (who previously directed the animated “Prince of Egypt”). Wells tells Zap2it.com that Pearce is one of the few young actors today who can pull off the role because he’s “one of the few actors working today who can look bookish and intelligent like a scientist.”
Pearce admits he is a bit bookish in real life, and prefers to curl up with his cats and wife, Kate Mestitz, and read a book quietly at their home in Melbourne rather than face an Oscar party in Hollywood.
Pearce likes spending time with smaller independent films where executives aren’t worried about test screenings or audience reactions, and there’s “a purity of creativity and inspiration.”