
Age: 58
male
Guy Edward Pearce (born 5 October 1967) is an Australian actor and musician. He has received various accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award and a nomination for an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and a BAFTA Award. He started his career portraying Mike Young in the Australian television series Neighbours (1986–1989). Pearce received international attention for his breakout role in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). Subsequently, he starred as Ed Exley in Curtis Hanson's crime noir L.A. Confidential (1997) and a man suffering short-term memory loss in Christopher Nolan's psychological thriller Memento (2000). He also acted in The Time Machine (2002), Bedtime Stories (2008), The Road (2009), The Hurt Locker (2009), The King's Speech (2010), and Lawless (2012). He portrayed Peter Weyland in Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), Aldrich Killian in the Marvel action film Iron Man 3 (2013) and William Cecil in the biopic Mary Queen of Scots (2018). In Australian cinema, Pearce has acted in The Proposition (2005), Animal Kingdom (2010), and The Rover (2014). For his performance in The Brutalist(2024), he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Since 2012, he has played the title role in the TV adaptations of the Jack Irish stories by Australian crime writer Peter Temple. Pearce starred in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011) and Mare of Easttown. The former won him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor.

William Mandella is a physics student conscripted for an elite task force in the United Nations Exploratory Force being assembled for a war against the Taurans, an alien species discovered when they apparently attacked human colonists' ships. The UNEF ground troops are sent out for reconnaissance and revenge. The elite recruits have IQs of 150 and above, are highly educated, healthy, and fit. Training is grueling – first on Earth and later on a planet called "Charon" beyond Pluto (written before the discovery of the actual planetoid). Several of the recruits die during training due to the extreme environments and the use of live weapons. The new soldiers complete training and immediately depart for action via interconnected "collapsars" that allow ships to cover thousands of light-years in a split second. However, crucially, traveling to and from the collapsars at near-lightspeed has enormous relativistic time effects.
