Priscilla Sequel Eyes 2027 Shoot, 2028 Release — With Terence Stamp's Final Scenes Already in the Can
Guy Pearce says the sequel to The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert will probably shoot in 2027 and land in cinemas in 2028. Pearce gave the timeline in an interview with Good Morning America, offering the first concrete window for a project first revealed in April 2024, when Deadline reported that original cast members Pearce and Hugo Weaving were back on board and writer-director Stephan Elliott was steering the follow-up (Deadline).
The path to those dates runs through a bittersweet chapter. Terence Stamp — who played Bernadette, the transgender woman at the heart of the 1994 film — died on 17 August 2025, aged 87, according to an announcement by his family. By then, his work on the sequel was already done.
Elliott told Deadline he decided to pre-shoot all of Bernadette's scenes because Stamp was aging, and that Stamp himself pushed back against any notion of a digital double. Stamp wanted to perform the character one last time, his own voice and presence, not a CGI approximation. In his final months he did exactly that: his Bernadette scenes for Priscilla Queen of the Desert 2 were pre-shot before his death in August 2025 (Deadline).
That urgency was Stamp's. In his last interview, he told Deadline he wanted to "get it happening, get it shooting" regarding the sequel. The pre-shoots were the answer — capturing his performance while there was still time, giving Elliott footage to weave into a film that would not otherwise exist.
The original Priscilla arrived in 1994, Elliott writing and directing a road-trip comedy about two drag performers and a transgender woman crossing the Australian outback in a battered tour bus. Weaving, Stamp, and Pearce starred. The film became a cultural touchstone, spawning a stage musical and a durable fan base that only grew across three decades.
Pearce confirmed in February 2025 that he was in talks with Elliott, Weaving, and Stamp about the sequel. By the time of his Good Morning America appearance on 30 August 2026, those talks had hardened into a probable production window (Deadline).
Pearce has been busy between Priscilla commitments. He is set to play Rupert Murdoch in Ink, Danny Boyle's film adaptation of James Graham's play about the media mogul's rise, with plans to shoot in October 2025 (Deadline).
For fans, the sequel now carries a dual weight — a return to characters loved for thirty years, and a final performance from an actor who insisted on finishing the job himself. Stamp's scenes are in the can. The road back to Priscilla has a few more miles on it, but it now has a destination.
