Priscilla’s Guy Pearce Dishes on Kylie, Spacey, Kate Winslet and More

Guy Pearce, star of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Memento, and the gay American history miniseries, When We Rise, talks some smack and shares some love in a new video.

Like contemporaries Russell Crowe (with whom he appeared in LA Confidential), Guy Pearce is one of those versatile actors whose capable of completely immersing himself in a role. And yet, when the chat gets candid, he gets a bit twitchy because, as this video reveals — he won’t lie about anything, either. You’ll find his comments about LA Confidential co-star Kevin Spacey… particularly illuminating.

He launched his career the same way many Aussies have over the years, in a featured role on one of the continent’s biggest TV series of the day, a soap opera called Neighbours, alongside co-star Kylie Minogue and a cavalcade of others.

Pearce and Hollywood have enjoyed a long and fruitful association since the mid-1990s, as the actor has appeared in both leading and supporting roles since. He’s played gay, as in the much beloved Priscilla (released in 1994, and co-starring Terence Stamp and Hugo Weaving), the appeared as Andy Warhol in Factory Girl (1996), as well as the brother of AIDS victim Tim Conigrave in one of the decade’s great gay weepers, Holding the Man.

In 2010, he took on the pivotal role of King Edward VIII opposite Colin Firth (who played his brother) in The King’s Speech. The film eventually went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (for Firth), and Best Original Screenplay. Pearce’s character (seen in much greater detail as a Nazi sympathizer on the Netflix series The Crown) abdicated the British throne the same year he was to become King, when he proposed to an American divorcée named Wallis Simpson.

Over the years, Pearce has said he’s open to the possibility of a sequel to Priscilla, and that he and co-stars Stamp and Weaving are all on board. Last year, he told Yahoo writer Ethan Alter that they and director Stephan Elliott frequently daydream about a second film. “Ideas keep coming up every couple years,” Pearce told Alter. “It would be fun. Each of us has a moment where we go ‘Why not?’”