Local hero Pearce shows the pluck of Irish

THE mid-afternoon slumber of a Fitzroy side street is ripped asunder as the front door of the heritage-listed Independent Hall explodes off its hinges.

A belch of smoke erupts from the former Congregationalist church building, and a ball of flame shoots across the narrow road. Dust and debris follow in a grey, stinky ball. And there, in the middle of it all, stands Guy Pearce.

Actually, it's not Guy Pearce, it's someone who looks a lot like him from a distance and a lot less like him up close. But the magic of digital effects will soon plop our Emmy Award-winning hero in the middle of all this chaos and we'll happily forget the stuntman ever existed.
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Pearce is back in his home town to play Jack Irish, the hero of four novels by crime writer Peter Temple and now the titular character of a pair of telemovies being made for the ABC.

Producer Ian Collie says it was a boon to land Pearce for the role.

''Guy was always on our wish list, but we thought he would be too busy; he's internationally respected, he's not going to want to do TV work,'' says Collie. ''But it just shows how much things have changed. Increasingly, good actors will be attracted to a TV project if the scripts and production values are there.''

Neither should be a problem: production company Essential Media is spending a healthy $5.6 million on the two 90-minute telemovies, and Andrew Knight is writing the first of them.

The cast is impressive, too: as well as Pearce, there's Crownies star Marta Dusseldorp as Jack's girlfriend Linda (a fictional journalist at this paper, no less), Aaron Pedersen as his sidekick Cam, and Shane Jacobsen, Colin Friels and Steve Bisley have supporting roles.

Yes, there's a lot of TV law-and-order on those collective CVs, but this is no standard procedural. ''This is different,'' says Collie. ''It's more nuanced and layered.''

For a start, Jack Irish isn't a cop. He's a lawyer, sort of. ''He's a bit of a jack of all trades, really. He does missing person searches, he's a cabinetmaker, he's a member of a horse-racing syndicate.'' Above all, he says, ''Jack is quite thoughtful and melancholic''.

On the day The Age visits, everything is running smoothly. But the eight-week shoot got off to a rough start when Pearce was diagnosed on day one with a kidney stone; they lost four days to his operation. ''He's in every scene, so there wasn't much we could do about that. It's not called Jack Irish for nothing.''

Still, it's not all about him. The stories are set solidly in a Melbourne that's at once recognisable and nostalgic, and the city emerges as a major character in its own right. ''It's almost a homage, or maybe a lament, for that old Melbourne that is disappearing,'' Collie says.

Jack's favourite hangout is the Prince of Prussia, described as one of the last ungentrified pubs in Fitzroy. ''It says everything that we're having to build it as a set in a studio,'' Collie says.