Angela Bloomfield looks back on a television history filled with reality TV romance, soap lightning strikes and a disturbing mermaid experience.
It’s been 31 years since a teenage Angela Bloomfield first stepped onto the set of Shortland Street, but those early days on the iconic New Zealand soap are still imprinted on her brain. “It feels like my DNA,” Bloomfield says of playing Rachel McKenna, the spoiled daughter of the hospital CEO who survived four marriages, alcoholism, an eating disorder, countless explosions and even being struck by lightning.
While Rachel McKenna is her most defining acting role so far, Bloomfield also starred in New Zealand films like Bonjour Timothy and The Frighteners, and later turned her talents to directing shows like Go Girls and Shortland Street and the award-winning Linda’s List. More recently, she’s also made several reality TV appearances on shows like Dancing With the Stars NZ, Great Kiwi Bake Off and Celebrity Treasure Island.
After leaving television to pursue a career in real estate, Bloomfield returns to the small screen in an upcoming episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries. She’s thrilled to appear in the tenth season of the beloved New Zealand series, and quickly discovered she wasn’t the only one excited by the opportunity. “I told my friends I was doing it, and it was quite lovely to get such a reaction like, ‘oh my god, really?’” Bloomfield told The Spinoff. “I realised there were all these Brokenwood fans in my life that I didn’t really know about.”
To mark the auspicious occasion of being murdered on the telly, we asked Bloomfield to look back on her life in television, including an obsession with American dating shows, a fondness for medical dramas and a terrifying near-drowning in Ferndale.
My earliest TV memory is… Off the top of my head, I would say Sesame Street, but I reckon it goes back a bit further than that. It was a morning TV show called Rainbow, with Bungle.
My earliest TV crush was… Scott Baio, from Charles in Charge.
The shows I was obsessed with as a child were… I feel like I’ve seen every Love Boat episode. I’m really showing my age, but I loved it because you’d see the guest actors at the start of each episode. Then I would say The Day of the Triffids and Sapphire and Steel. I was allowed to watch Sapphire and Steel, but Mum and Dad would let me watch the odd Day of the Triffids episode even though it was past my bed time.
The TV moment that haunts me is… Once on Shortland Street we were filming out on a lake. Rachel McKenna was on a pontoon, dressed in a foam mermaid tail and an Ariel wig that came to below my bum, sitting out there drinking in the sun. Eventually, the whole drama was that she fell off the pontoon. There were scuba divers in the water who had obviously prepared for it in terms of safety, but no one really went: “it’s a sponge outfit and it’s a really long wig”. I couldn’t see anything and I felt like I was going down and it was terribly scary. I think I came up looking like it was a near death experience, and they got me out of that lake so quickly.
The TV ad I can’t stop thinking about is… I’m a bit of a sookie bubba, and I love the old story ads – which were a lot more emotive back in the 90s – where you have the family and you follow their life. And it sounds awful, but those police ads. There was one years ago where the police knock on the door and there’s no dialogue, and the parent and the child… it’s just too much for me. It’s too real.
My TV guilty pleasure is… I haven’t actually watched the last couple of seasons because I think it has worn itself out, but the American Bachelor, Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise. It’s like a soap opera. I’m just a romantic. Even though I’ve worked in reality TV and understand that the end goal is not to actually get people together, in my heart I still watch it and go, “oh, they’re gonna get together”.
My favourite TV moment from my own career is… Working with Michael [Galvin, Chris Warner on Shortland Street]. They got to the point with Michael and I where they’d just write these two headers for us, and they were just so on point. Typically, they’d be emotional scenes or scenes with weight, and I have such fond memories of that. It’s wonderful when you’re working with someone that you trust with your life and with a script that seems to sing. For me, that probably outweighs all the falling off pontoons and lightning strikes.
My favourite TV project that I’ve ever worked on is… The stuff I’ve directed, because I feel like I’m at the core of creating stuff. Go Girls, first episode, first season, that was a really big and favourite part of my life, and then I would say Brokenwood. It’s fun, it wants to entertain, we got to do stunts, and I had a fabulous wardrobe. I got to just run around yelling at people and being awful.
The TV show I would love to be involved with is… The Morning Show with Jennifer Aniston. The production values and the script and the characters and the conversations they’re trying to force the audience to have would be a dream come true. New Zealand’s version of that would be great.
My most watched show of all time is… Shortland Street, because I’ve directed it and been in it, and Grey’s Anatomy. It’s a more souped up, more expensive version of Shortland Street, and Shonda Rhimes is very good. I still enjoy it. I can see it’s not necessarily in its heyday, but there’s comfort and familiarity with something like that, much like why people watch Shortland Street.
My controversial TV opinion is… I can’t handle too much conflict. I’m sure that’s the same for any human being, but in the programme The Bear, I mute the arguments. Sometimes I’ll skip 10 seconds if I feel like I don’t need it.
The last thing I watched on television was… A documentary on Netflix called He Lied About Everything. It’s about this doctor that had this breakthrough product, which was something in your throat, and basically he went around putting it in people and they all died. It’s intense.
The Brokenwood Mysteries screens on TVNZ1 on Sundays at 8.30pm and streams on TVNZ+.