Guy Pearce is taking a break from acting.

The 44-year-old actor - who has starred in The King's Speech, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark and The Hurt Locker in recent years - admits he has been struggling to read scripts in the last few months and has decided to quit acting for a while.

"I'm taking six months off, yeah. I've worked way too much in the last two years and I'm just sort of blank. I read scripts and glaze over them at the moment. I need to just kind of go and be me for a while," he said.

The Australian star - who also has a part in Ridley Scott's much anticipated Alien prequel Prometheus - thinks he has run out of energy to take on new parts: "You just get to a point where you become vacuous. I just don't have any energy to be anyone else other than me. So yeah it's really important. People sort of say, but just read this one script. I'm like no, there's no point in me reading this script, because I'll resent it."