'I've got to be careful': How the grief of losing his dad as a child impacts Guy Pearce in fatherhood
The pain of losing a parent when you're a child never goes away, and the grief can hit you in waves you may not expect.
It's something that actor Guy Pearce is wrestling with now while raising his son Monte.
The 57-year-old opened up about how losing his dad when he was a kid has impacted him as a father during a candid interview on The Jess Rowe Big Talk Show podcast.
Watch the video above.
Guy Pearce was just eight years old when his dad died, but seeing his son at that age has changed things for him as a father. Getty
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"What's kind of really poignant for me right now is my own son (Monte) is eight," he explained.
Pearce himself was just eight years old when his dad died in an aircraft accident, he was an RAF test pilot, and explained it's had a really big impact on how he sees the world.
"Here I am every day looking at him going, 'Right.. OK, I was that,'" he said.
"I think I remember elements of that period back in 1976, but I don't really know who I was because I couldn't look at myself objectively.
"Whereas now I have this sort of opportunity to do so… and I'm a little bit fixated on it."
Pearce admitted he is trying to take a step back from putting too much of his own history onto Monte.
"Not that I'm trying to project that onto him. But I'm even thinking down to like, right, so it was exactly this many days. How old was I exactly the day that dad died?" he said.
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Pearce explained he knows the exact number of days after his birthday it was when it happened, and the same day will come for Monte, which something that is really sad to think about.
"It's particularly poignant because I have my own boy and I've got to be careful not to project my own historical grief and sadness onto him because he's not having that experience," he added.
"I need to make sure I don't enforce that, or force that on him."
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Looking at his son, who is now the same age he was when his dad died, is a difficult thing to navigate. Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP
Elsewhere in the interview he opened up about his dad dying at age 39, and how that number has become one of real significance to his life.
"I spent my whole life thinking about about what it must be like to be 39, because that was the age he was when he died," he explained.
"And coincidentally, I was doing a movie called death defying acts when I turned 39."
But it was the following year things felt different.
For a lot of people, turning 40 is a huge milestone. But Pearce admitted it was one he had never really taken notice of because 39 it was the age before that had consumed his thoughts.
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Guy Pearce shares son Monte with ex Carice van Houten. leavecaricealone/instagram
Pearce shares son Monte with ex Carice van Houten.
The former couple kept their relationship under wraps over the years, but welcomed their son Monte in 2016.
Van Houten recently confirmed that they had split, arevealing they haven't been together "for years".
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