When I ask Guy Pearce if he thinks he has it in him to be a spy, he pauses, then says – insert your own middle-class Australian accent tempered by years of Hollywood here – “I don’t know. I’ve not really given it serious thought.”

Surely he doesn’t have to, I say. I have never given serious thought to whether I could be a spy, but I could still tell you: categorically not.

“Why not?”

Too disorganised, too indiscreet, too risk-averse.

“When I was younger, I used to think I could be a spy,” he says. “I used to think I could sneak around, act like one thing when, really, I might have thought something else.”

Well, he has a poker face, I point out.

Pearce is an actor of extraordinary skill and range, his talent is very still, very subtle, very potent. Unguessable passions rage just below the surface of Pearce’s poker face.

“That side of things, I certainly could do,” he says. “Absolutely. Whether I would have the nerve to front up in another country, when the stakes were really high and one’s life was in jeopardy? I’m not sure I’d have the chutzpah for that. But sure, if I had to maintain a poker face, keep some secrets, I can certainly do that.”

Mine is not an entirely random line of inquiry. Pearce and I are talking over Zoom about his latest project, A Spy among Friends, the television adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s bestselling book about Kim Philby, the British intelligence officer who, in 1963, was revealed to be a double agent for the KGB. It hit his best friend of 27 years, the intelligence officer Nicholas Elliot, pretty hard.

Pearce plays Philby in the direct aftermath of his exposure, as he defects to the Soviet Union. Damian Lewis plays Elliot, Anna Maxwell Martin is Mrs Taylor, Elliot’s debriefing officer, and bloody hell, it’s good.

As crisp and cool and clever as anything you are likely to see this year – a substantial investigation of male friendship, betrayal and social class.

“It is superb, isn’t it, I have to say,” says Pearce. “I saw those first two episodes and just went, ‘Wow, OK.’ Nick Murphy is a brilliant director. Really, I find him absolutely exquisite. I worked with him on A Christmas Carol. When he called me about A Spy among Friends, I was like, ‘Yes,’ before I even really knew what it was about. Occasionally things come along that are absolute no-brainers.

When Mildred Pierce came along, my agent said to me, ‘Now, Todd Haynes and Kate Winslet and HBO, they…’ I’m just going, ‘Say yes! Just say yes!’ ‘Well, we’ll send it to you, see what you think.’ I’m like,

‘It’s clearly going to be good. It’s f***ing Kate Winslet and Todd Haynes!’ ”

‘I was an anxious kid.
I found the fame and attention that came with Neighbours hard’

Which is funny because here I am, right now, thinking, “It’s f***ing Mike from Neighbours!” The cheekbones, the jaw, the flop on the hair, the Aussie vernacular. (“If you’ve got a friend who’s committed a crime, do you dob that friend in or do you stick by your friend?”) Pearce might be 55 years old, a chameleon of an actor, a revered, award-winning veteran of the big and (infinitely classy contemporary) small screen. He might have been immaculate as a drag queen in Baz Luhrmann’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), a cop in LA Confidential (1997), an amnesiac in Memento (2000), a soldier in The Hurt Locker (2008), a king in The King’s Speech (2010), a love interest in Mare of Easttown (2021) and so much else besides, but part of him will (in the minds of those of us of a certain age, at least) for ever be the heartthrob Mike Young in the Eighties heyday of a kitsch, cheery, recently cancelled Australian soap opera.

Neighbours was Pearce’s big break. He was 18 when he was cast as Mike and played him for three years before leaving and reinventing himself as a credible international movie star (just as his cast mates, Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, were reinventing themselves as pop stars). Now, with three and a half decades of impressive acting under his belt, with Emmys and Screen Actors Guild awards cluttering his mantelpiece and even as he’s delivering a considered, intelligent thesis on Kim Philby’s motivation (“I vacillate between, on one level, believing what Philby claimed he believed in the beginning, which was that the life of communism was really the answer, to the other end of the spectrum, thinking that the guy, on some level, was psychopathic”), here I sit, still, thinking, “It’s f***king Mike! From Neighbours!”

I pull it together long enough to ask if Pearce thinks spies and actors have crossover skills. One could argue that acting is just a form of lying and manipulating.

“I remember, years ago, doing some press for a film and we were doing junket stuff,” he says. “All of a sudden, the journalist came down, sat in front of me and he said, ‘So, you’re an actor. So, basically, you’re just a liar.’ I was about 24 at the time. It really threw me, really triggered me. Stuck with me for a long time afterwards. The conclusion, I suppose, that I finally came to is that we all have the ability to act. We all have the ability to pretend we’re happy when we’re not, for example. If you do it positively, in a positive way, it may be that you hone it as a craft, like acting, and it’s an art form. If you do it negatively, you might just end up being a liar. I probably bristle a little bit when people ask me.”

Sorry.

“I didn’t bristle with you.”

Oh, good. I’d hate to annoy Mike from Neighbours.

Pearce is thoughtful, eloquent, very hung up on getting to the truth of things, which is why my asking if acting is the same as lying is a bristling matter. “I get so angry with people when they bullshit,” he says.

What happens? “I just become really sort of trapped and limited and I can lash out.”

If he seems a little intense, that’s because he is, I think, and with good reason. When he was very young, his father, Stuart, an RAF test pilot – Pearce was born in Cambridgeshire; his family relocated to Geelong in Victoria, Australia, when he was three – died in a plane crash. Pearce has said this left him feeling responsible for his family: his teacher mother, Anne, and his elder sister, Tracy, who has the learning disability Cornelia de Lange syndrome. That sort of pressure, combined with grief, can certainly take the edge off a carefree childhood.

Pearce was eight when his father died, and pretty shortly afterwards, he discovered acting.

“My mother loved the theatre and I used to go with her,” he says. “And very early on, I just wanted to be up there. I don’t think I knew why at the time. I just felt this compulsion to be up there. The effect that those actors had on me, I suppose, the power that they had, the control, I was really drawn to.”

That would make sense to a kid whose dad had just died, who presumably felt utterly powerless, like life was horribly out of control.

“I really was a control freak,” he says. “And yes, watching people on stage, really wanting to be part of that, because there’s a wonderful sense of control about it. It’s all controlled – script, audience, lights, costume. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Control. Emotion. Big emotions, but all controlled.”

He started off in amateur groups, a member of the Geelong Society of Dramatic Arts Junior Players. At 16, he veered off on a spate of competitive amateur bodybuilding and landed the title of Junior Mr Victoria.

At 18, he got an audition for Neighbours.

I had sort of assumed, based on everything he has achieved since, that Pearce wouldn’t want to talk about Neighbours, but I am wrong. I take a punt and ask him what it was like being a sex symbol.

“I found it so awkward,” he says.

As an avid schoolgirl viewer, I very much appreciated it, I tell him.

“Well, thank you very much. Look, that’s where I probably realised I had an ego.

Because there were moments where girls would be chasing me down the street and then I’d be going, ‘Wow, OK. Wow!’ But, at the same time, I’d be extremely anxious about it, scared of it. I was a pretty anxious kid. I wasn’t overly confident. I was biting my nails all the time. I found the fame and the attention and all the stuff that came with Neighbours really hard, basically. I got better at handling it, but I had to really focus, manage it.

He took a year off at the end of 2001. ‘I was exhausted. And smoking way too much pot’

“When I started on the show – December 2, 1985 – it had been on another network for some months. It failed and they axed it. The marketing people at Channel 10, one guy in particular, Brian Walsh, said, ‘We should buy that show because I can turn it into a success.’ So Channel 10 bought the show. I started in the first episode of Channel 10 and the producer said to me, ‘Now, just so you know, we had to get rid of some of the actors because they were turning up late and they were taking drugs, so if you turn up late and you take any drugs, you’re f***ing out, OK? And by the way, the show’s probably gonna fail, so don’t f***ing get too big for your boots.’ “I was 18 – I’d only just turned 18 two months beforehand – and I was very disciplined. I’d done theatre for ten years.

I learnt my lines. I was like, ‘No, no, I’m just a nice kid from Geelong. I don’t know what you’re even talking about.’ ”

Pearce’s initial contract was for six weeks, which “turned into a year and that turned into four years, and the rest is history”. He left Neighbours in 1989, discovered he “had to unlearn some things I learnt on that show”, resurfacing in 1994 as the touring drag queen Felicia Jollygoodfellow in Baz Luhrmann’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

This reinvention caused ructions. A straight male soap star heart-throb wearing a wig and feathers and make-up and playing gay – the kind of thing that would get him cancelled now, or at the very least declared “problematic” – made everyone sit up and take notice of an actor they might otherwise have dismissed as fluffy, soapy, unserious.

Pearce was up and running. By the time Memento was released in 2000, he was established as a substantial, reliable, unpredictable talent. (Does he think he’s talented? “I was great in Memento. I was great in LA Confidential. I am great in this show [A Spy among Friends]. I’m only saying this to you. I would hate for you to print that.

I know you probably will.”) Only philistine idiot former Eighties schoolgirls like me still think of him as Mike from Neighbours.

It was at this point, 2001, that Pearce had a breakdown.

“A big crash and burn,” he says. “It was a confluence of things. The pressure I started to feel about working in America and the whole making hay while the sun shines philosophy. And of course, as an actor, you never usually work back to back unless, of course, you’re in a soap. All the time you have off between jobs, it revitalises you. You get to be yourself again and recharge, all that sort of stuff. But you don’t realise that until you start doing movie after movie after movie and you’re f***ing exhausted. Plus, I was smoking way too much pot.”

So he was stoned and exhausted? “Stoned, exhausted and questioning it all.

I was 31, 32, 33. I realised I was being horrible to everyone..” He took a year off “at the end of 2001”, took to his sofa and smoked a lot more pot and might never have acted again had the musician Nick Cave not cold-called him about a script he had written for a western called The Proposition.

“I was at home with my mate, getting stoned again,” says Pearce. “The phone rang.

I just let the answering machine answer it. I wasn’t looking at scripts. Scripts would arrive and I just put them in a pile in the corner.

I’d said to my agent, ‘I don’t f***ing want to read anything.’ I wanted to get away from all of this. And Nick rang – I didn’t know Nick – and left a message saying, ‘Er, yes, Guy, it’s Nick Cave calling. Look, your people seem to think that if I call you directly, you’ll perhaps take notice.’ ”

Pearce is a devoted musician – he has released two albums. Cave’s unsolicited, unexpected interest in him had an impact.

“ ‘Er, we’ve sent you a script. It’s called The Proposition. I gather you might have it and I know you’re not reading things at the moment, but I’d really like you to read it. We’d be interested in you for this.’ I’m sitting there with my mate, going, ‘F***, where’s the f***ing pile of scripts? Oh f***!’ It was like a scene out of a Bill & Ted movie. Me and my friend, Andrew…” He mimes frantically tearing a room apart while wasted, in search of a script.

“And I find the script and I couldn’t read it that night, but the next day I start reading it and something opened up in me. I realised that, in fact, I’d had enough time off and I’d also had enough time thinking about what I needed to think about. Which really was: is this valid, this job? Am I any good at it? Am I OK with it? Can I live my life with this job? That’s the question I never asked when I was eight.”

Oddly.

“Yeah, dickhead! What a dickhead eightyear-old I was.”

Pearce made the film, renamed Lawless, his career recommenced and here we are.

I ask Pearce how he’s finding the ageing process. He says he didn’t give “a f***ing rat’s arse” about turning 40. “My dad was 39 when he died, so I spent my whole life thinking 39, 39. What’s it going to be like when I’m 39? And of course, I turned 39 and it’s a bit silly, really, because Dad was also 38. He was also 37 etc, but you sort of go, right, he died at this age. Something left me after that. It was good.

Then, leading up to turning 40, everybody’s saying, ‘Wow, 40, eh? How do you feel? Oh my God, 40!’ But I hadn’t thought about it.

I have had more of a thing about ageing recently. I’ve just turned 55 and I really notice how I’m starting to look old. I was doing a film last year with Liam Neeson, Memory, and I was looking at the dailies, going, ‘Wow, I really can see the wrinkles and stuff.’ I’ve probably always looked a bit younger than I am. I’ve got some good cheekbones, good bone structure, but definitely, particularly now that I have a six-year-old son, all of a sudden I feel quite old.”

Ah, that surprise six-year old. Pearce never intended to be a father. For 18 years, from 1997 to 2015, he was married to the psychologist Kate Mestitz, whom he had known since school. The two had resolved not to be parents. “When Kate and I started going out with each other, I said to her, ‘Look, just so you know, I don’t really want kids.’ And she went, ‘Urghh, I never want kids,’ and I went, ‘Oh, great. Good.’ A big part of why I never wanted to have children was because I helped raise my sister – I have a sister with an intellectual disability – so I felt like I’d done my parenting. For a long time, I definitely knew I was never going to have kids. It was quite definite.” Shortly after he and Mestitz split up (I don’t know why, though I do know Mestitz instigated the split), Pearce began a relationship with the Dutch actress Carice van Houten, star of Game of Thrones.

And then, “Things changed and we got pregnant quite quickly.”

‘I’ve just turned 55 and I am starting to look old. I can really see all the wrinkles and stuff ’

Was it planned? “Maybe not really planned. Maybe it was a bit of a surprise.”

Six years ago, in 2016, their son, Monte, was born. “And of course, I am just besotted with my child. I mean, it’s ridiculous, although it took a while for me to actually believe that my child was really my child. It’s a sort of slow turning around of the ship. Even though my body was kind of going, ‘You’re my child and I just want to hold you close,’ my brain was going, ‘No, you don’t have a child.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, but I do’. My brain is going, ‘No, you decided years ago you were never going to have a child.’ ”

Pearce, van Houten and Monte live in Amsterdam.

Because Pearce is still, residually, eternally Mike from Neighbours to me, I raise the issue of the soap’s final show, broadcast in the UK on July 29, 2022, following Channel 5’s cancellation of it earlier this year. Many of the original cast members returned for the occasion, Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan (whom Pearce always calls by his character name, Scott, just as Donovan calls Pearce Mike) among them. Pearce not only agreed to take part in the last episode; he turned in a performance worthy of his illustrious, critically acclaimed, award-winning career.

“Somebody told me I won that by about six goals,” he says cheerfully.

Was it fun? “Oh, it was glorious. Funny and nostalgic.

Over the years, since I left the show, all of us have been asked to go back at times.

Obviously, I had other things going on in my life, so I never did, even though secretly, deep down, I wanted to. In fact, I sneaked onto the show. I don’t even remember when it was – probably ten years after I finished? I was an extra in the coffee shop and nobody knows.”

Nobody? “Nobody. I went to visit them on set. My friend, who used to work in costume there, we happened to be out that way in Melbourne.

We said, ‘Let’s go to Channel 10. Let’s go and visit them.’ So we just turned up, went into the studio and we’re watching them film. Then the floor manager said, ‘Hey, get in the f***ing coffee shop. Put this beanie on.’ So he put this football beanie on us, a football scarf round my neck, because he had one. He said, ‘Go on, sit in the back of the coffee shop.’ So I just sat at the back of the coffee shop, drinking a cup of tea, like this [he mimes]. I don’t even remember who the actors were. I don’t remember what the scene was. I have no idea.

I just sneaked in.”

And nobody noticed? “Nobody even noticed. Ha, ha!”

Pearce looks delighted by his small act of – what? Rebellious nostalgia? Surreptitious, unsolicited, unacknowledged, generous, hilarious, opportunistic background artistry? I end our Zoom call thinking, ah, he’s not that intense, after all.

 A Spy among Friends is on ITVX next month