Long before Hollywood actors were falling over themselves to appear in television series, there was a clear, snobbish line between film and television. “I remember, years ago, when I was on a television show and so many serious actors would sort of scoff and go: ‘Why would you do a thing like that?’” remembers Guy Pearce. “And now everybody is on television.” Does he feel vindicated? “Yeah. Well, it still doesn’t raise the quality of the show that I used to be on.” He laughs. “I’m not naming it, in case I get myself into trouble.” I hope he doesn’t mean Neighbours – Australian institution; after-school viewing ritual; launchpad, in Pearce’s late-80s glory years, of the careers of Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, too. “Well, it was great,” he concedes, “but it wasn’t the highly innovative, cutting-edge stuff we see now.”

Is he surprised that, 30 years on, people still talk about his role as the teacher Mike, he of the good nature and knife-edged cheekbones? “A bit. I know it was huge at the time and people adored it. I feel really proud of it and thankful to have been part of it, but it’s not even that people go ‘Ah, yeah, I remember’; it really is very present for people. It’s like it’s going to live on. It’s great. Jason and I still call each other Scott and Mike.”

They’re still “really close” friends, Pearce says. “We went to Kylie’s 50th a few months ago, which was the first time the three of us had got together.” Do they call her Charlene? He smiles. “No, I wouldn’t do that with Kylie. But Jason and I take the piss.”

There is an assumption, he says, that Pearce – who went on to bigger things – never wants to talk about Neighbours, but he says that’s not the case. “I probably love it because I’ve had the chance to do other things. I’m sure if I’d not …” He smiles. “Although I have had situations here where I’ve walked down the street and people have said: ‘Have you done any other acting since Neighbours?’” He laughs. “‘No. Just waiting to go back to Ramsay Street.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Good neighbours: Guy Pearce as Mike Young and Jason Donovan as Scott Robinson. Photograph: FremantleMedia Ltd/Rex/Shutterstock

Pearce’s career path may have passed some people by because of his unusual, disparate choices. After Neighbours, he played a drag queen in Priscilla Queen of the Desert, before his big break as a conscientious detective in LA Confidential and the lead in Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film Memento. Then, just as A-list status seemed within easy grasp, he all but disappeared for a couple of years before coming back with the Australian revenge film The Proposition in 2005. There have been more commercial choices – The Count of Monte Cristo and The Time Machine – that didn’t fare too well, and roles in serious dramas including The Hurt Locker, The King’s Speech, and HBO series Mildred Pierce.

Since 2012, Pearce has been playing the private investigator Jack Irish on Australian TV, and now he is in a new Netflix drama, The Innocents, created by a British team and set in Yorkshire, London and Norway. In the supernatural thriller, two teenagers run away together, only for the girl, June, to discover she has shape-shifting powers. Pearce plays Dr Halvorson, a scientist who becomes fascinated – as you would – with these shape-shifters, for there are more of them out there (all female); we meet him in the first episode, holed up at a Norwegian outpost with at least two of them.

“He’s a mysterious chap,” says Pearce. “I think he was somebody in the British medical community who must have been, not necessarily kicked out, but I think he just worked against the grain. I think his ego got in the way a little bit. So for him to have this strange condition fall into his lap, I think he sees it as a real opportunity to make a name for himself. He wants to help these women, and he’s extremely curious, but he probably should be doing this with a team of other experts. He’s clearly isolated himself so he doesn’t have to deal with the authorities.”

Pearce likes working in TV – there is less chance that the story will be messed around with by meddling execs. “That stuff seems to happen more than I would like. It just depends on how insecure the film-makers are, or how much money is involved.” But, these days, it isn’t just movie executives who get a say in the industry; loud voices on social media have the power to derail a project. If a role such as Priscilla were to come up again, would he – a straight man, playing a gay drag artist – be cast again? “I don’t know. We copped a bit of flak at the time: ‘Why are there three straight actors playing three gay roles?’ It’s a difficult subject to get into.” But is it dangerous when we start to say that only a certain actor can play a certain role because of their gender or sexuality? “I do think it’s dangerous, personally,” he says, before skirting around the subject for several minutes. “I feel, like, in any of this sort of stuff, you have to take each situation …” He doesn’t finish the thought.

But he is dismayed, he says, at how easily people seem to take offence these days. “I think resilience is going out the window, which is a shame. People love to be offended, which is a really offensive thing to say. Somebody is going to be offended by me saying that.” He has tried to make sense of it – he comes across as deeply thoughtful – and concludes that “everybody has something in themselves they feel is fragile, delicate, misunderstood, not heard, and we want that part of ourselves to be heard. We’re not relating to each other, we’re just all going: ‘I need to be heard now and I’m going to be offended until I’m heard.’ And if you cast that person in that role: ‘I’m not heard, therefore I’m offended, therefore that’s wrong, end of conversation.’ What’s happening to us? It’s like we’re all functioning in the world as if it’s road rage and these are our cars [he picks up his phone] and we’re behind the safety glass of Twitter and all that stuff.” Many responses are valid, he adds. “There are a lot of people who are hideously offensive out there and that needs to be addressed, but there’s a whole gamut of stuff and [people jump] on bandwagons and it’s really hard for all of us to know what to say or do.”

If he is being more cagey than his otherwise openness suggests, it is probably to do with the “explosive response” – his words – to comments made earlier this year that Kevin Spacey, with whom he worked on LA Confidential and who has since been accused of sexual assault, was “handsy”. He won’t go into it again: “I think I said enough about that.” But has he noticed a difference on sets, post-Weinstein? “Not necessarily. I think a lot of men are talking about how things need to change, but I think, with a lot of the bad behaviour that happened, things aren’t always overt. If someone is overt about something, you call them on it.” Has he done that? “A little bit, yeah. But I don’t know how much it’s really changed yet. We’re realising things need to change, we’re in that phase. People need to feel like they’re able to speak up and other people will support them. I don’t know how quickly that’s going to change, and that’s the unfortunate thing.” And, he adds, “it’s not just in our industry. Power is power and people will take advantage.”

Pearce, now 50, has been acting since he was eight. “I wasn’t able to assess this when I was eight, but I think I was really struck by the effect it was having on me, and I wanted to be part of that,” he says. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that he discovered theatre around the same time that his father, a test pilot, died in a plane crash. “If I look back at it now, I probably wanted to have that kind of control and know I could affect an audience.” Pearce was born in Cambridgeshire – his mother is from County Durham – but the family moved to Australia when he was three. His older sister, Tracy, has Cornelia de Lange syndrome, a learning disability, and he has talked about feeling a strong sense of responsibility for his family after his father’s death. Did he not think acting was an uncertain, unreliable job to go into? “No, because it just felt completely honest to me. On some level, I’m sure Mum went: ‘This little boy has had to deal with a whole lot. If this is what he wants to do, I’m going to support it.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Guy Pearce as Dr Halvorson and Ingunn Beate Øyen as Runa in the Netflix series The Innocents. Photograph: Richard Hanson/Netflix

His sister has had a profound influence on his life, not least keeping him grounded – almost, it seems, to the point of being wary of enjoying his own success too much. People would say to his mother all the time how proud she must be of her son – he got the Neighbours job when he was 18 – and she would say: “No more proud than I am of Tracy.” It was one of the reasons he never moved full-time to LA or believed his own hype. “The imbalance of fame,” he says. “I can’t genuinely go: ‘Yay, fame, great!’ knowing that there are people like my sister and other people who can’t function in the way they want to in the world. That keeps things in perspective for me. Fame, to me, is completely out of whack.”

After Memento, when any other actor may have felt he had made it, Pearce felt burned out and disillusioned with the industry (“a real kind of exhaustion breakdown”), and took time off to reassess his life. “Even though [Memento] was received really well, I felt like all my own insecurities and my own difficulties were not being addressed. I was kind of going: ‘I’ve got this [success], why do I still feel like this?’” He made music, saw friends. Reports that he had slumped into debilitating drug use were not true. “I’d been smoking lots of pot leading up to that time, and that didn’t help,” he clarifies. Was he worried he wouldn’t get back into Hollywood? “It was much more about making sure I found good work and that I was able to deliver good work.”

In that, he has been largely successful – there have been big-budget films, including Prometheus and Iron Man 3, a role in the upcoming British film Mary Queen of Scots and a directorial debut in the pipeline. This year, he also released an album of his music, written in the painful aftermath of the breakdown of his 18-year marriage in early 2015. That was, he says, “a big year for me, just the whole world turning completely upside down. That’s what’s great about it, too, I suppose – what you think is your world can completely change, and that’s when you go: ‘OK, how do I manage this?’”

Three years on, Pearce’s life has changed again – he is in a relationship with the actor Carice van Houten, known for her role as Melisandre in Game of Thrones, and, after always saying he had no intention of becoming a father, he now has a one-year-old son (he splits his time between Melbourne, where he often works, and Amsterdam, where Van Houten and his son live). “I don’t know how it’s changed me yet, other than focusing on him and being completely in love with him,” says Pearce. “It might teach me to be more patient, but it still feels relatively new. I’m still getting my brain into believing it’s actually happening. My heart’s there, completely and utterly, but my brain is still steering the ship around.”

There is a tangible lightness to Pearce: he doesn’t seem to hold on to things – career plans, expectations – too tightly, and seems to thrive on reinvention and the chance to confound expectations. In many ways, a shape-shifter.

The Innocents is available on Netflix from 24 August