Entertainment
Spy drama star Guy Pearce was always going to return to his Neighbours roots-Gabriel Tate-Entertainment – Metro
‘Once I knew the show was finishing, there was no question.’
Guy Pearce (Picture: ITV)
Guy Pearce has starred in some of the biggest and most critically acclaimed films of the past 25 years. But the work that really gets his juices flowing is the one where it all began.
A question about his return to Neighbours for what was then its final episodes prompts a broad grin as he produces a Ramsay Street sign with signatures from all the cast and crew.
‘Look, it was beautiful for me,’ he says over Zoom from Australia. ‘I’ve been asked a number of times if I’d pop back and I always wanted to – there was a nostalgic, special sort of feeling I had about it but I didn’t want to slip back unnecessarily.
‘Once I knew the show was finishing, there was no question and, for me, it meant a lot because it was the launch of my working life on screen.’
So transparent is his delight, I’m less than convinced when, in discussing his latest role as British Cold War traitor Kim Philby, he goes on to claim, ‘I completely have what it takes to be a spy! Any acting skill I learned was purely as a matter of survival.
‘If I was in a group of people who were smarter, tougher or funnier than I, then I would act smarter, tougher and funnier than I was. I would adapt to the point thatI realised, in later life, I don’t quite know who I was or what I stood for – I was morphing into whatever was around me and fitting in.’
Guy as Mike Young in Neighbours (Picture: Brendan Beirne/REX/Shutterstock)
Pearce plays Philby in A Spy Among Friends, ITVX’s gripping six-episode miniseries dramatising one of the great betrayals of the Cold War, when the British intelligence lynchpin defected to Russia in 1963 – a trauma MI5, MI6 and even the CIA would take decades to recover from.
Just before he bolted for behind the Iron Curtain, Philby was approached by pal and fellow British spook Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis), who tried to turn Philby back to his side before it was too late.
Kim Philby (right) in 1955, a British spy who defected to Moscow (Picture: J. Wilds/Keystone/Getty)
How did he get away with it? For Pearce, it was Philby’s decades being accepted as ‘one of us’ that allowed him to pull off being ‘one of them’ for so long.
‘Philby railed against British establishment his entire life while also enjoying the benefits of that upper echelon existence,’ says Pearce. ‘Having my own child now [six-year-old Monty with actress Carice van Houten], you realise how vulnerable we are when we’re young.
‘Philby was brought up with a father who was a civil servant in India and experienced the negative sides of British thinking, and he can’t get that out of his system.
As Philby, Guy helps dramatise one of the great betrayals of the Cold War (Picture: ITV)
Damian Lewis (left) and Guy as British spooks Nicholas Elliott and Kim Philby (Picture: ITV)
‘Deep down, there’s a part of him that hates that this establishment is ruling the world – his communist beliefs are absolutely sincere. But there’s also a game to be played and he was intoxicated by that thrill.’
Although raised in Australia, Pearce was born in Cambridgeshire, the son of an RAF test pilot and a teacher from Hartlepool. Like Philby, he felt a little caught between two worlds.
‘I don’t know how I’d define myself,’ he says. ‘I’m very proudly Australian but at the same time, I can’t quite let go of my British roots.
‘I used to watch Brit comedies with my mum – It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, Hi-De-Hi!, Benny Hill… all pretty inappropriate! But they did mean I felt I had a connection that made me different, a secret nobody else knew about.’
A Spy Among Friends is streaming on ITVX from tomorrow
McClure, Tennant and other ITVX must-sees
David Tennant plays former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko who was poisoned with polonium-210 (Picture: ITV)
A Spy Among Friends isn’t the only show launching on new streaming service ITVX tomorrow.
Fans of the teen classic Skins will find a lot to love about Tell Me Everything – an unflinching look at mental health and anxiety in Gen Z.
Then there’s The Confessions Of Frannie Langton, an unusual slave-era drama that sees Karla-Simone Spence as a Jamaican servant who starts an affair with her mistress – until the latter winds up dead in her bed.
And for laughs, there’s the feature-length conclusion of Plebs: Soldiers Of Rome, as the loveable idiots finally have their chance to write their names in the history books when they go to war.
Beyond tomorrow’s big kick-off, ITVX is promising one big launch a week and they don’t get much bigger than David Tennant in four-part drama Litvinenko (Dec 15) about the former FSB officer who was poisoned on British soil with polonium-210 in 2006.
Vicky McClure in psychological thriller Without Sin (Picture: ITV)
There’s also Riches (Dec 22) with Hugh Quarshie as a businessman who has turned his cosmetics firm into a global success – that is until he suffers a stroke and a divided family needs to put their differences aside.
There are nature documentaries, with A Year On Planet Earth (Dec 22) narrated by Stephen Fry.
And, finally, Vicky McClure is at her scintillating best in four-part psychological thriller Without Sin (Dec 22). She stars alongside Johnny Harris as a grieving mother – who develops a relationship with her daughter’s killer.
MORE : Guy Pearce has had Neighbours producers contact him about returning to the show
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