When a lavender tour bus called Priscilla first crossed the Australian outback in 1994, it turned drag into a mainstream postcard and handed three straight-identified actors — Terence Stamp, Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce — the most tender roles of their careers. Three decades on, the sequel that fans had written off as impossible carries a weight none of them wanted: it has quietly become a film about goodbye.

Guy Pearce, out promoting other work, offered the first real sense of where The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert 2 stands — and the update matters less as a schedule than as proof the project survived the loss at its centre. Terence Stamp, who played the transgender Bernadette in the original and died last August at 87, had already completed his scenes. As Deadline first reported, writer-director Stephan Elliott pre-shot Stamp’s performance rather than gamble on the role, knowing time was against the actor.

That decision reframes the whole enterprise. Elliott, who wrote and will direct as he did in 1994, has described a story shaped by watching Stamp grow old — an attempt to put ageing within LGBTQ+ and trans lives on screen, a subject he argues cinema still dodges. What began, by his account, as a plot he chased for decades has turned into something closer to a tribute, with Stamp’s finished footage to be completed using a stand-in and digital face replacement.

For Pearce and Weaving, both of whom built formidable careers after the bus — Pearce through Memento, The Proposition and Mare of Easttown, Weaving through The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings — the return is less a franchise obligation than a reunion with the film that first let them be flamboyant and vulnerable in public. Australia’s most exportable comedy is coming back as its most personal.

Pearce laid out the timetable plainly on Good Morning America: “We’ll probably shoot it ’27. It’ll come out ’28.” That points to cameras in the desert in 2027 and a finished film in 2028, roughly thirty-four years after the original crossed the same sand.

If it holds to that schedule, audiences will see Bernadette one last time in a performance Stamp completed knowing it would outlive him — a farewell shot, deliberately, while there was still time to shoot it.

Tags: Guy Pearce, Australian cinema, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert 2, Stephan Elliott, Terence Stamp