As he makes a surprise return to Shortland Street, actor Craig Parker takes us through his life in television.
Craig Parker has been a fixture on television in Aotearoa for nearly four decades. He had starring roles in iconic local series like Gloss, Mercy Peak and Diplomatic Immunity, featured in TV movies Shackleton’s Captain and Waitangi: What Really Happened, and starred in international hit dramas like Reign, Legend of the Seeker, Charmed, Spartacus and Good Trouble. He also played Leg Haldir in the Lord of the Rings films The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, but the role that most New Zealanders remember Parker for is one he played 30 long years ago.
As Guy Warner on Shortland Street, Parker beamed into New Zealand homes five nights a week for four years through the mid 1990s, and became one of the show’s most beloved characters. It’s a role Parker hasn’t been able to shake since. Even on a visit to Aotearoa earlier this year, Parker continued to be recognised as Chris Warner’s little brother, the earnest social worker who loved a waistcoat, became both a drug addict and a self-help author and who once fled the country, taking his brother’s wife and son with him.
But rather than run from the ghost of Guy Warner, Parker is thrilled that New Zealanders still associate him with the long-running soap. “I think for everyone who did any length of time on Shortland Street, we’re always going to be that person,” he tells The Spinoff from his home in Los Angeles. While he says “it blows my mind” that the show is still going after 32 years, and he’s incredibly grateful for the opportunity to make guest appearances over the years. And it’s always an easy decision to come back to Ferndale – “I’m always happy to do it because it’s Shortland Street. It’s part of our collective history.”
As Guy Warner makes another welcome return to Ferndale just in time for the 2024 Shortland Street Christmas cliffhanger (“huge! Drama, drama, drama!” Parker promises), there’s no better time to reflect on Parker’s stellar life in TV. “It’s lovely to go back and realise how many points of life are connected to moments in television,” Parker says, as he looks back on a life filled with Ollie Ohlson, Coronation Street and The Muppets. “They’re markers of time, but some of those kids shows I watched were so important. They taught me how to be, or how to live, or what I wanted.”
My earliest TV memory was… I grew up in Fiji and we didn’t have television, so when we came to New Zealand in the school holidays, we’d stay with my Auntie Betty and Uncle Noel. We would have dinner on trays, which was so exciting and wild, and we would sit with Coronation Street on and the volume turned down, but not off. So it was just the most awful, annoying thing, and the television was black and white. That music, and it was full of very dull people and very dull experiences.
The TV show I used to love as a child was… I was the Ollie Ohlson generation – “keep cool ‘til After School”. I just loved Ollie so much. I got to work with him many years later. There’s a whole generation of kids who loved him, and it felt like he was choosing shows just for you. Ollie’s After School show had cartoons, it had dramas. He was amazing. He truly was one of those real, genuinely lovely human beings.
My earliest TV crush was… I loved Romana from Doctor Who, who was one of the Doctor’s assistants. I thought she was the most beautiful, smart, fabulous thing. I wanted to be Tony Danza so desperately, he was the coolest person in the world, and I loved Lindsay Wagner as the Bionic Woman. I got to meet her as an adult many years later, and she is so goddamn classy and perfect. It was a huge thrill.
The TV ad I can’t stop thinking about is… “It’s the same day, David”. Such a serious message that became such a terrible, bad taste joke. I still find myself saying it. I say it here [in LA], and people have no idea.
My TV guilty pleasure is… Riviera. I shouldn’t have watched it, but I did. It’s about big, fancy rich people in the Riviera, and it is so bad and so terrible, with actors doing outrageous performances. It became my secret obsession for a while.
My first TV role was… Hotshotz. [In the 1980s] New Zealand used to do kidult shows where the adults were stupid, someone was bad, and the kids saved the day – no one believed them, but they solved the crime. I played Nicholas, whose father was a race car driver but had died in a crash, and Elizabeth McRae was my housekeeper/guardian. I was a loner with a limp and a remote control helicopter, and I met these kids who had remote control cars, and we discovered a counterfeiting ring. The adults didn’t believe us, so we used our remote control cars to save the day.
On my very first day shooting, at lunch, everyone knew each other. This was my first gig, and I was terrified, going “where do I sit?”. Liz McRae came up beside me and went, “oh, I hate these first days, I never know where to sit. Would you sit with me?” I knew exactly what she was doing, but it was just the sweetest, kindest thing. I remembered that ever since. That’s the sort of responsibility of a good grown up on set, just taking care of people. I love her forever, for many reasons, but that’s certainly one.
My favourite moment from my own career is… Reign, which we shot in Toronto. It could be very silly at times, but it was a show that everyone, cast and crew, just loved and wanted to make the best. It was a really glorious period for the four years I worked on it. All of the cast had come from other places, so we were all living in the city and we bonded very much. We’d go out to dinner and spend a lot of time together, and they were a collection of just wonderful, smart, good people. It was probably the happiest chunk of time I’ve ever spent.
The most stylish person on television is… Anita Macnaught. I remember when she first appeared in New Zealand and was just so astounding and glorious, and then I spent some time with her in London when I used to live there, and she was always a woman with integrity and style. She’s spectacular.
My enduring memory from the early days of Shortland Street is… Being terrified, and Michael [Galvin] and I beginning every scene with a tail end of a joke, and then laughing to show that we were brothers. Initially [on Shortland Street], it was the joy of quite a small cast and we weren’t quite aware of what the world thought of it yet. When it did take off, that bond of the cast was so important, because everyone had their little moment of spinning out and dealing with it.
It is a ridiculous thing that suddenly, you can’t walk past a school at 3pm because it would just be mental. I’ve tried to explain to friends here that there was a period where we were as famous as Tom Cruise, comparatively. There was nowhere that you weren’t known. And then, quickly working out that that actually means nothing, and you have to get on with your life and find a way around it. There was a lot of processing of that kind of stuff, and each person doing it differently. But I think we were lucky to have that core group of people to go through it with.
The show I wish I’d been involved with is… Friends, just for the residuals.
My most favourite TV character of all time is… Marj from Shortland Street. Again, I love Liz McRae, and Marj was an example for us in defining what soap was for New Zealand. She pushed the comedy envelope so far, she stretched Marj in any way that was the best way to stretch her, but she never lost the humanity of Marj. She never lost the reality of the character. Even when she was being Outrageous Marj, you still felt that she was a real person, and you still loved her. She was often the voice of disapproval or bigotry. She would be used to represent ordinary New Zealand being a bit hideous, yet she made it understandable – and when she had the revelations and came around to a better way of thinking, it made perfect sense. I think it helped change New Zealand in certain ways.
My most watched TV show of all time is… I think I watched every Doctor Who episode ever. The Muppet Show I go back to lots and lots. When I just want to be happy, I will find an old episode and watch that. But I think the thing I’ve probably watched more of than any other show on earth is Shortland Street, because there’s just so much of it. I had already watched it for a long time, but I would watch the episodes that we did. So there were four years worth of five times a week. Hundreds of hours of Shortland Street. Ridiculous.
The TV show I’ll never watch, no matter how many people tell me to, is… Yellowstone. It’s Trumpland, dressed up. It’s probably got some great performances, but one of the things I’ve become very aware of living over here is that you cannot divorce politics from storytelling. When you tell a story, one has to be very clear in knowing how the story is being perceived, I think.
The last thing I watched on TV was… The Diplomat. I love all the cast. It’s soapy enough to be a good romp, but it’s also fantastic. I loved the first season, and this new season has just lifted the game.
The Shortland Street 2024 cliffhanger screens on Monday 23 December at 7pm on TVNZ2 and streams on TVNZ+.
