People

By Lev Grossman

Q&A with Guy Pearce

Australian actor GUY PEARCE (L.A. Confidential, Memento) stars in The Hard Word, about three brothers who rob banks. It opens this Friday

I don't know what "the hard word" means. No, I realize that. I've just been in America, and nobody knew what we were talking about.

So ... To put the hard word on somebody is to try and coerce somebody into doing something. Like a guy who keeps asking a girl out on a date, and it kind of just gets a bit full-on.

Have you ever put the hard word on anyone? Ah, no. I tend not to. It seems as if Hollywood is run by an Australian Mafia these days. Do you and Russell Crowe hang out? Well, Russell lives up in New South Wales, and I live down here in Victoria. So we're a fair distance from each other.

Ever steal anything? Yeah, we pinched a car, a friend of mine and I, when we were about 15.

You stole a car? Yeah, a VW Combi. And drove it round the block and took it back to where we got it from. We couldn't work out why it wasn't going very fast, and we realized that we hadn't taken the hand brake off. We were fairly useless as car thieves.

How did you steal it? Did you hot-wire it? I don't remember. It was down the beach, so people might have just left the keys in it.

JULIA, IS THAT YOU?

Look carefully at the cover of the July Redbook. It looks like JULIA ROBERTS, but it's not. Oh, that's Julia Roberts' head and Julia Roberts' body, but the head is from a photo taken in 2002, and the body is from the premiere of Notting Hill in 1999. Apparently acting on the theory that the whole is less than the sum of its parts, Redbook cut and pasted the two images to form a single, beautiful but inhuman Julia. (Cover line: THE REAL JULIA. Irony much?) Now the real real Julia is hopping mad. To restore journalistic integrity to the pictorial exploitation of celebrities, we present a photo of the total Julia. Doesn't she look fine in one piece?

LUTHER IS KING

It may be the first time in history that a man without the power of speech has the No. 1 record in the country. LUTHER VANDROSS had a stroke in April, and although he's no longer in a coma, he's still in the hospital. But his new album, Dance with My Father, buoyed by a hit single and sympathetic fans, sold more than 400,000 copies last week to grab the top spot on the Billboard charts--something Vandross had never done before. By contrast, last year's American Idol runner-up, Justin Guarini, who can't shut up, saw his first solo album debut at No. 20.

SPLITSVILLE KID ROCK AND PAMELA ANDERSON

Like a rare butterfly that's simply too precious and beautiful to live more than but a brief span, the yearlong engagement between bodacious V.I.P. actress Pamela Anderson and rock-rapper Kid Rock is dead. Anderson has been spotted gadding about without her engagement ring, and she is quoted in the current issue of PEOPLE as saying, "The word that best describes me now is 'free.'" What happened? Did Anderson grow jealous of Rock's sumptuous furs? Did she finally wake up one day and realize that she was way, way better looking than he was? Or did she simply conclude that no matter what she did, she could never fill the void in Rock's heart left by the late midget rapper Joe C.? Most probably Rock, 32, got wind of that Ashton Kutcher--Demi Moore pairing and realized that at 35, Anderson was just too young for him.