The star of Madam, Shortland Street and that Britney Spears music video shares his life in television.
Martin Henderson’s love of television began early. As a young boy in the 1980s, long before TV broadcasting ran 24 hours a day, Henderson would wake up every weekend and put the TV on, just to sit in front of the test pattern. “I was such a TV junkie, it didn’t matter what it was,” Henderson told The Spinoff from Los Angeles. “Doctor Who, The Dukes of Hazzard, MacGyver, the A Team, Chips, the news. I watched literally everything.”
That early love of television saw a young Henderson score his first onscreen role in the Margaret Mahy kidult drama Strangers in 1989. At the age of 17, he joined a plucky new soap called Shortland Street and played wayward teen Stuart Neilson for three years, before Hollywood beckoned. Over the next two decades, Henderson starred in movies like The Ring, Bride and Prejudice and Everest, and won major roles in dramas like Off the Map and Grey’s Anatomy. He currently stars as Jack Sheridan in Netflix’s hit drama Virgin River – and of course, we cannot forget his cameo with Britney Spears in her iconic Toxic video.
Most recently, Henderson returned home to star in Madam, the award-winning New Zealand dramedy about a woman who opens an “ethical brothel” in small town Northland. Henderson jumped at the chance to play Rob, the cheating husband of brothel owner Mack (Rachel Griffiths), and to reunite with a New Zealand cast and crew that included Danielle Cormack, his Shortland Street colleague from three decades earlier. Madam has resonated strongly with audiences, and Henderson reckons the secret to the show’s success is simple: “it’s good”.
“As soon as I read the scripts, I was laughing out loud, but it also has a lot of pathos. The characters are really well drawn, you care about them and you’re really rooting for them – no pun intended.”
Returning home to make a TV series was a full circle moment for Henderson, and as we asked him to look back on his life in television, he was reminded of how influential the small screen has been on his career. “I don’t think it’s any accident that that’s the way I earn my living today,” he says. “Being a part of the industry that I was such a huge fan of as a kid is a real privilege, and I’m really happy and grateful for that.”
My earliest TV memory is… Getting up on a Sunday morning and turning on the TV and sitting in front of the test pattern. Then Praise Be would start, with the opening wide shot of the cathedral, and after that, The Good Life or To the Manor Born. I watched Prisoner, too. That was on at two o’clock in the afternoon, and if for some reason you had to come home from school early, I loved that Prisoner was on. It was just these hardcore women in prison. It felt really adult, you know? I felt like I was watching something I shouldn’t be.
The TV show I used to rush home from school to watch was… Grange Hill. Again, it felt sort of adult, and it was really exciting. I was at primary school and there was something about watching kids who were rebels, you know, a bit older. They were teens with attitude. There was probably a sort of a pseudo-sexual, romantic, intriguing thing that I probably didn’t understand at all at that age. I loved peeking into that world.
My earliest TV crush was… Kylie Minogue. I remember when ‘The Locomotion’ came out. I was probably about 12, and I recorded the music video on VHS and just watched it, rewound it, watched it again, rewound it. I was quite smitten.
The TV moment that haunts me the most is… In my very first show Strangers, there was a scene where I had to put a pair of glasses on and do my hair in the mirror and think I was cool. The glasses looked terrible on me. I felt like Dame Edna Everage. I thought I looked like a dork, and that crushed me at the time. It was my first job, and I was mortified that that was going to be out for public consumption.
The other embarrassing moment just came to me that I’ve obviously buried deep into my subconscious, but you’ve managed to dredge it up, was back on Shortland Street. Stuart was crushing on Danielle Cormack’s character Alison, and I had to do karaoke to a Dave Dobbyn song. Somehow Stuart got a ghetto blaster and a mic, and he serenaded her in her apartment. I probably had a bit of a crush on Danielle, and it felt like I was standing in my tighty-whities, trying to ask this older woman for some romantic attention.
In fact, it would have been less embarrassing to be in my tighty-whities, than trying to sing that song. I was horrendous. It was mortifying, because you want to be cool, even if it’s fictitious. I was 17, Danielle was in her early 20s. It just felt humiliating.
The TV ad I can’t stop thinking about is… The Pixie Caramel commercial. The guy’s in prison and someone says “any last requests?” and he says “a Pixie Caramel”. I loved that commercial. I don’t think I was a huge Pixie Caramel man, but there was something kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark about the whole setup.
My TV guilty pleasure is… Watching English football, rugby and sport. I tend to watch it at night. The thing I love about sport is that it’s really engaging and there’s kind of a narrative to it, like good versus evil. If you’re into a team, you don’t have to follow the plot, you just watch the ball go back and forth. I like the mindlessness of that. It lulls me into a sleepy mood.
My favourite moment from my own career is… When Shortland Street started to work. I think everyone can agree that when it started, it wasn’t that good. Half of us were novices, the other half were cynics. But there was a commitment to making it work, despite things that were glaringly problematic, and when we harnessed that focus, it started to find an audience. When it became clear that we were going to go more than one year, that was a really wonderful feeling. We were the underdog, and there were all these reasons why we wouldn’t succeed – and then we did. That felt so rewarding.
My favorite TV character of all time is… When I was five, it was The Hulk. I was obsessed with the Hulk. Now, I’m a huge Succession fan, and I thought Logan Roy was a wonderful character.
My favourite TV project that I’ve been involved with is… Madam, of course. And Raiders of the South Seas, which was a show I did for South Pacific Pictures when I was 15. We dressed in 1940s costumes and we had planes of that era flying overhead and we transformed this resort in Whangaroa Harbour into a 1940s town. Dean O’Gorman and I played buddies and were on location away from home, and at that age, everything was impressive and new and exciting.
The TV show I wished I was involved with is… Succession. The writing’s just so good, and the actors are having a ball. I mean, the characters are the most appalling human beings. You wouldn’t want to ever meet them in real life, let alone be related to them. It’s a very challenging writer who’s willing to really scratch way beneath the surface to see all the reasons why someone’s horrible.
The show I’ll never watch, no matter how many people tell me to is… Breaking Bad. For whatever reason, something has to grab me fully, and I just didn’t persist with it.
The last thing I watched on TV was… Federer: 12 Days. I love watching tennis. It’s one of my favourite sports, to just sit on the sofa and watch the ball go back and forth. I didn’t know a lot about Federer, aside from his incredible talent and track record. I’d give it a B+.
Madam is available to stream on ThreeNow.