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Guy Pearce is an actor who is known takes up roles that leave him far away from what he looks. He totally immerses himself in roles that make him look out of the ordinary. There are times when his own directors fail to recognize the guy.

When writer director Jeffery Nachmanoff first met the 40 year old actor for talks on his new movie the Traitor which opens this week he just walked right past the guy.

“We met for lunch, and I looked around the restaurant,” recalls Nachmanoff. “There was only one other person there and I didn’t know it was Guy. And he said to me, ‘Jeffrey?’ I’m like, ‘Guy!’ I don’t know why, because he doesn’t change that much, but there’s something about him, and I think a lot of great actors have this. He wants to disappear into his parts.”

In “Traitor,” the English-born, Australian-raised Pearce slips out of recognition courtesy of a clipped goatee, a heavy Tennessee accent and full-immersion into a complex character — a federal agent whose Baptist upbringing and respect for other faiths provide him with the keys to unlocking the secrets of former U.S. Special Operations officer and devout Muslim Samir Horn ( Don Cheadle), who has been linked to terrorist activities in Yemen, Nice and London.

“Roy Clayton is more understanding of Samir’s position than anybody else in the FBI actually is,” says Pearce. “What they have in common is that Roy’s father was a Baptist minister, and Samir’s father was a religious man as well.”

The film is a solid exploration of faith and terrorism has a scenario that was created during the filming of the 2003 blockbuster Bringing Down the House. Hoberman and partner Todd Lieberman then recruited Nachmanoff, who wrote 2004’s climate-change thriller “The Day After Tomorrow,” to develop the idea into a screenplay.

“When [Guy and I] first sat down to look at the script, he was enthusiastic about it,” says Nachmanoff. “He said, ‘Look, Jeffrey, I normally have a lot of notes. I have to say, I don’t have many notes on this script. But let’s literally go through it page by page and look at every line.’ And we did. And he would analyze sometimes down to a contraction, saying ‘I do not’ versus ‘I don’t.’ That type of thing, for Guy, could be important.”

Pearce is known to carefully to take each part of the film and make notes on it. “I’ll generally write out every scene that’s in the film on a couple of pieces of paper, just with a little one-line” summary of each scene, says Pearce. “And then I can scan it a bit and go, ‘This first third of the film, generally, I’m kind of calm.’ Then I might do something on one piece of paper that just relates to the energy of the character.”

He is also know to take the script every weekend and reread the scenes for the next week and then takes a big picture look at the film. If there were any queries he would politely ask Nachmaoff about some details. Pearce explains: “I’ve got a bit of [obsessive-compulsive disorder], I think, so I can get a little obsessed about detail stuff.”

Pierce’s childhood holds many key elements to his acting styles and interpretation of scripts. Born in England in 1967, Pearce moved to Geelong, Australia, with his parents and developmentally disabled older sister when he was 3. Then in 1976, his father, a military test pilot, died in a plane crash that made national headlines.

“I would feel quite anxious around people and be nervous that I was going to get asked some question I couldn’t answer, and I wasn’t going to know what to say,” recalls Pearce, who currently lives in Melbourne with his childhood sweetheart and wife, Kate Mestitz. “On stage, you’ve got dialogue you’ve learned. You’ve got a paying audience. It couldn’t be better, you know? My therapist would say it’s probably because of having lost my dad when I was really young and, that being a really tragic thing, that [I was] worried about what was potentially around the corner being really disastrous. So in doing a play or doing some structured work as an actor, it’s set. That’s probably why I was drawn to it, in a way.”

His career breakthrough was in the Nolan movie Memento. “It was a pivotal film for me and quite a good representation of what I’m interested in,” he says. “It probably enabled a little more confidence. I tend to project my father figure onto any director that I’m working with, or mother, if I’m working with a female, or it can be confused. But Chris Nolan’s trusting me was really important and just allowed me to trust myself more.”

But just after that he fell into the critically panned The Time Machine which almost killed his career for good. He lost a lot of his confidence and was also considering quitting the profession.

“It was a bit of a breakdown, actually, and I was smoking a lot of pot leading up to that time as well, and that clearly didn’t help at all,” he says. “I’d just been taking opportunity after opportunity after opportunity. I didn’t have my own direction going on. So it was really about decompressing, and I was seeing . . . a therapist, and I just needed to take stock.”

But then suddenly there were a series of understated yet critically lauded films like The Proposition and his role as Andy Warhol in Factory Girl. He still has a string of films lined up like the Cormac McCarthy adaptation “The Road,” December’s Adam Sandler comedy, “Bedtime Stories,” and the Australian true-crime saga “In Her Skin.”

But his role in Traitor has made him find a new found understanding of how religion works in different societies “I’ve got a T-shirt that says, ‘Jesus saves,’ and the ’s’ in ‘Jesus’ is a big dollar sign,” he says. “I’ve worn it here [in America] and had people come up on the street and go, ‘You can’t wear that.’ People in Australia think it’s funny. I’m fascinated by religion. I don’t believe in God, but the thing I do believe in is that we’re all connected. And I guess that’s what other people might call God. I don’t know enough about religion to really say, but on some level, doesn’t everyone just believe in a different version of the same thing?”