Guy Pearce says he ‘wanted to punch snobby actress’ over ‘horrible attitude’

Actor was questioned over his role on the Australian soap ‘Neighbours’

Guy Pearce has recalled an interaction with a “snobby” female actor, which left the LA Confidential star wanting to “punch her”.

The Australian actor, who is currently up for an Academy Award for his supporting role in the acclaimed period drama The Brutalist, said that the incident took place around a year after he left the Aussie soap Neighbours.

Pearce, now 57, played Mike Young on the popular TV series between 1986 and 1989, before transitioning to a career in Hollywood.

“In the old days you were either a theatre actor or a film actor, and if you got stuck in a soap you were the lowest of the low,” he recalled in an interview with The Times. “But what an opportunity. I had no clue what I was doing but learnt a lot.

“When young actors ask me for advice, I shrug and say, ‘Get lucky?’ Because I got lucky.’ That said, it [Neighbours] really was frowned upon.”

He went on to describe the interaction that took place when he was in a theatrical production after leaving the soap.

“I did a play a year after I left and this snobby actress said, ‘How could you even do that?’ I wanted to punch her!” he says.

Guy Pearce photographed in May 2024 (Getty Images)

At this point, the interviewer noted that Pearce has “a habit of simply blurting stuff out”.

“Now, obviously, I didn’t punch her,” the actor clarified. “But it was such a horrible attitude.

“And then, five years later, I saw her on some s*** ad on TV. I so wanted to go and find her and say, ‘OK …’”

The Independent has contacted a representative of Pearce for further comment.

Pearce raised eyebrows earlier this month with another interview in which he called his ex-wife, psychologist Kate Mestitz, the “greatest love of his life”. At the time, he was believed to be in a relationship with Game of Thrones actor Carice van Houten.

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Pearce was married to Mestitz from 1997 to 2015. He had been dating van Houten, with whom he shares a son and lives with in the Netherlands, for the past nine years.

After the interview was published, Houten confirmed that she and Pearce were no longer together.

He has drawn rave reviews for his performance in The Brutalist, playing a sinister tycoon who takes troubled architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) under his wing.

In a five-star review for The Independent, critic Clarisse Loughrey writes: “What’s been heavily advertised – The Brutalist’s 215-minute running time, including a built-in, 15-minute interval; the use of the high-resolution, widescreen VistaVision format, which hasn’t been deployed for a full American feature since 1963; and the distribution of the film on 70mm prints – isn’t simply the fetishistic marker of an old school auteurist.

“It’s not a film to devour, but to be devoured by. There’s such a weight to it that it creates its own field of gravity – which, coupled with the same fierce cynicism of [director Brady Corbet’s] previous films, The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and his pop star psychodrama Vox Lux (2018), turns a traditional historical epic into an existentially disturbing monster movie. The monster in question, of course, is America.”

The Brutalist is in cinemas now.