Guy Pearce on playing a drag queen in the days before RuPaul’s Drag Race
Before RuPaul’s Drag Race catapulted the art of drag into the mainstream spotlight, filmmakers like To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar‘s Beeban Kidron and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert helmer Stephan Elliott crafted feature narratives around the performative craft. And as Priscilla star Guy Pearce explains to PeopleTV’s Lola Ogunnaike in a recent episode of Couch Surfing, the task of bringing drag queens to the big screen was more difficult than he anticipated.
“This looks all calm and lovely, [but] I don’t know if you’ve ever sat on top of a bus, on top of a stiletto, driving on a road [while] there’s a curve on the road,” the Australian actor, 50, remembers of an iconic scene from the 1994 classic in which he lip syncs to an opera song atop a speeding vehicle while donning a flowing gown made of chrome fabric. “So, the bus, as it sort of swayed from one side of the road to the other. of course where I was sitting at the top, that sway was like 30 feet. And I’ve got this earpiece in and I can’t hear a thing because the wind…. that was a lot harder than it looked, that little scene. It was worth it though.”
Pearce admits it was physically demanding playing one-third of a band of LGBT companions — two drag queens (Pearce, Hugo Weaving) and their bereaved, transgender accomplice (Terence Stamp) — trekking across the Aussie Outback on a performative tour, though Ogunnaike points out taking on such a role in the early ’90s might have placed a “stigma” on his career.
“No, I wasn’t,” he responds when asked if he was worried about the impact on future work. “I had people saying to me, ‘Oh, you’re sure you want to do this?’ I was like, ‘Yes, absolutely I want to do this!’ I was so excited about it. It was a hoot and the whole thing was fantastic.”
While he says he enjoyed making the first film, he shot down long-gestating rumors of a potential sequel to the project.
“There’s been a lot of talk about it over the years. I think Stephan, our writer-director, has sort of entertained the idea, but I think it’s best left alone. It’s that sort of attitude I think he has… [it’d be] pretty tragic now, because we’re all about 100… I don’t know, it could be funny!”
