(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 27 November 2025 5:30, UK
There are some things that Australians are very good at, namely daytime soaps, cricket and inventing animals of every description that seem designed to do nothing but either kill people or instil outright fear in them. But to give them credit – Australians, that is not the killer animals – another thing they do well is make cool films about people like Mel Gibson in deserts driving awesome looking vehicles, just ask fellow actor Guy Pearce.
Pearce himself is one of those Aussies, together with Chris Hemsworth and Margot Robbie, who took the hop from Neighbours and/or Home and Away to Hollywood, but he was one of the first to do it, and do it in very impressive fashion, appearing in a string of historic films almost straight off the bat.
After appearing in a couple of initial Australian dramas, Pearce’s breakthrough came with the flamboyant The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in 1994, a road-trip comedy about two drag queens and a transgender man travelling across the Outback on a big silver tour bus. It was a surprise hit, proving influential and spawning a musical, and Pearce, as one of the leading roles, got plenty of attention from Hollywood.
That led to his being cast in the noir thriller L.A. Confidential two years later alongside another fellow down-underite in Russell Crowe on the James Ellroy adaptation that was nominated for nine Academy awards, winning two, and it probably would have been more had it not been up against Titanic.
At this point, Pearce was a bona fide Hollywood actor, and he cemented it with his astonishing work in Christopher Nolan’s first major hit, Memento, in 2000, for which he picked up several award nominations. After that, he mixed theatre with supporting roles, including another multi-Oscar winner in 2010’s The Hurt Locker, and most recently had another Academy Award nomination for his performance in The Brutalist.
In picking out his five favourite films for Rotten Tomatoes, Pearce referenced the likes of Gibson as a trailblazer for actors from his neck of the woods. One of his picks was the historical epic Gallipoli from 1981, a war movie about two Australian athletes sent to fight in Turkey during World War I, with Pearce saying: “I think that film for me is this incredible combination of the brutality of war and yet the sensitivity of the human spirit, and I think Mel Gibson is absolutely electric and fantastic in that film. I (also) think that the music used in Gallipoli is just utterly heartbreaking. Really, really heartbreaking and beautiful.”
Pearce also selected another film from the early 1980s in the form of The Elephant Man, the film based on the life of the famously disfigured Joseph Merrick that starred John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins and John Gielgud, stating: “The film just struck a chord in me that nothing ever had before, and it does to this day when I watch it.”
Elsewhere, Pearce went with the classic Marlon Brando drama A Streetcar Named Desire from 1951, and referenced what an inspiration the American was to him as an actor, raving: “I’m not saying anything that anybody hasn’t said before, so excuse my banter, but you just cannot take your eyes off him. I think as a young male actor at the time, when I first started seeing that film, you just wanted to deliver everything that he could deliver, and of course, none of us can.”
Aside from the fairly ubiquitous pick of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather from 1972, Pearce also chose Bridget Jones’s Diary from 2001, starring Renee Zellweger, which stands out like a sore thumb among the others, let’s be honest. Nonetheless, Pearce said, “There’s something to me about that film that’s like the perfect romantic comedy. I just think it’s a bit hard to put my finger on what it is, to be honest. It’s just beautifully executed. Everything’s so well balanced. Often, whenever I read a romantic comedy now, I’m comparing it to Bridget Jones and if it’s planned well.”
Guy Pearce’s Five Favourite Films:Gallipoli (1981, Dir. Peter Weir)Bridget Jones Diary (2001, Dir. Sharon Maguire)The Godfather (1972, Dir. Francis Ford Coppola)A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, Dir. Elia Kazan)The Elephant Man (1980, Dir. David Lynch)