Guy Pearce made the leap from Aussie soap Neighbours to become a highly-acclaimed actor. But he's still keen to escape Tinseltown to go back to his roots Down Under.

STARS from Aussie soap Neighbours have a better record at becoming pop stars - think Kylie, Jason, Holly and Natalie - than actors. The exception is Guy Pearce, who played clean cut Mike Young. He's talked about in the same breath as Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Hugh Jackman and the others leading the Aussie charge in Hollywood.

To be strictly accurate, he's not Australian. He was born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, going to live with his family in Geelong, Victoria, when he was three. He can claim North-East connections too, as his schoolteacher mother came from Stockton.

Pearce is happy to be an ordinary Guy, eager to return to his wife Kate and his Down Under home in Melbourne once the cameras stop rolling in Tinseltown. You also get the feeling that a small independent film like Memento means an awful lot more to him than the mainstream movies he's made since moving out of Ramsay Street.

US producers first spotted him in a frock in Adventures of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert before teaming him with Crowe in the Oscar-nominated LA Confidential. In the past few months, he's been seen on screen in two big budget movies - The Count of Monte Cristo, as the villainous Fernand Mondego, and now a remake of the HG Welles adventure The Time Machine.

At 34, he knew it was time for a change. "I'm trying to let go for a while after being too precious about everything I do," he says. "The last couple of years I've been working fairly flat out, and I was getting a big angsty on every job. I'd be a little short-tempered at everybody and everything."

Unlike any other Hollywood actor, he didn't take himself off to a therapist to share his troubles in the psychiatrist's chair. Pearce started to read Buddhist scriptures and meditate. He feels it's helped him not to be jaded and lose focus "of who I am and what's important in my life".

The tough process of reaching that point began last year when he took a trip for 30 days on the North-East coast of Australia, staying in a community of Aborigines. He stopped drinking and smoking and began meditating.

"It took some time to clear my head but I made it and now I'm keeping a disciplined routine of meditation," he says. "My mind is so much more aware, and can drift anywhere and explore the world."

The change is obvious in his working methods too. "I feel I'm more ready and able to take on a situation. I used to be some wild animal as an actor but now I've reached some balance where I can control my emotions and my impulses, and figure out things with more clarity".

In The Time Machine, he stars as a scientist and inventor determined to prove that time travel is possible. His tests take him 800,000 years into the future where mankind has evolved into the hunters and the hunted.

Given the opportunity of time travelling, Pearce says he'd consider it as a realistic option while remaining a little fearful of what effect it would have on the world. "But, of course, we all would like to go to some destination and try it. For me, it would be to find out about the lottery numbers, so I could make enough money to call the shots in Hollywood," he says.

The former Neighbour admits to feeling a little "empty" when doing a film like The Time Machine because of being a small piece in a huge machine. "You're not the centre of the film as you are in a more intimate drama," he says. "So, this means your performance can disappear behind the special effects, the creatures, the concept of the film itself. It's a risk you take, but it's worth it because beyond the money, which is good, you also meet talented people that you hope to work with later on.

"There are also in big movies some confusions that are frightening for an actor. Like not knowing for sure who's in charge and who's giving the direction. Is it the director, the producer or the executive from the studio?"

He tells of studio bosses altering films behind the backs of the actors. It happened on The Time Machine, where it was agreed there wouldn't be any romantic involvement between his character and the girl from the future, played by Samantha Mumba.

Yet, in the finished film, there's a shot of them holding hands, suggesting there's a romance going on. "Those are not our hands. We never shot that sequence," says Pearce.

"So it's nothing like doing a piece like Memento where you are with the director in charge of the course of the destiny of the film. The big movie payday allows me to do more personal and intimate pictures where I can be truly judged for my craft and ideas."

He plans to continue living in Australia with his wife, whom he met at school. He considers Los Angeles as his office and Melbourne as his home, and prefers to go back and forth.

And he has no desire to be as famous as Russell Crowe. "He's always been 27 steps ahead of me. He has a driving ambition. I don't have that the way he does," he says.

The Neighbours effect is waning now. "We would all get recognised all the time as there were a lot of teenagers watching the show," he recalls of his time in the soap. "I was a teenager when I made the show. People would shout out my name from across the street and stuff. It was quite strange really."

After completing The Time Machine he opted to take time out after a hectic few years in Hollywood. "I really don't like to work too much, do back-to-back films," he says. "By the end of the film there's a real need to just be Guy again. Go home and play in the garden, and play my guitar and be with my wife and just be me."

* The Time Machine (PG) is showing in cinemas now.

Published: 01/06/2002