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Acting on Shortland Street isn’t as easy as it looks. (Image Design: Archi Banal)
Acting on Shortland Street isn’t as easy as it looks. (Image Design: Archi Banal)

Pop CultureMay 25, 2022

What it takes to be a Shortland Street actor

Acting on Shortland Street isn’t as easy as it looks. (Image Design: Archi Banal)
Acting on Shortland Street isn’t as easy as it looks. (Image Design: Archi Banal)

Getting cast on Shortland Street is a dream come true for many New Zealand actors – but that dream takes work. Sam Brooks gets an insight into how much.

To celebrate Shortland Street’s 30th birthday, we are dedicating a whole week to the good (and not-so-good) people of Ferndale. Check out more Street Week content here.

“Good acting” is subjective. Just ask people what they think of Nicole Kidman and the responses will vary from “love her, she’s a goddess” right down to “can’t stand her, she’s my nemesis.” It also depends on context. Rhys Darby’s performance in Our Flag Means Death is great, but put it in Squid Game and it would be the most diabolical acting anybody has ever seen.

Shortland Street is fascinating context for an actor, to say the least. It’s a soap opera with ridiculously over-the-top plots, but it’s also set in a facsimile of the real world. The performances have to make sense whether a penis pic has just been discovered on the family tablet or a truck has just been driven through the hospital wall. No matter how silly or unrealistic it might seem, the audience needs to believe in the emotional reality of what’s happening.

It’s the actor’s job to carry that tone and sell it to the audience. That’s a tall order on any TV show, but how do they do it when they have to literally shoot an episode a day, could have anywhere from 30 to 100 pages to learn in a given week and probably have to pretend to be married to Chris Warner at some point?

Turns out, it takes a lot of work.

Kura Forrester as Desi on Shortland Street. (Photo: South Pacific Pictures)

“The acting style is just really, really believing in quite dramatic stuff,” says Kura Forrester, who plays Desi, one of the all-time top tier Shortland Street receptionists. While the show is very different from anything she has done before – which ranges from intense dramas to improv comedy to stand-up – it’s become easier the more she’s done it. 

Initially, she tried to get into the same rhythm as the rest of the cast, a lot of whom have been working on the show for years. At one point Ria Vandervis, who plays Harper, turned to her after they did a scene together and told her that she was speaking “fluent Ferndale” now.

“We speak fast, we act fast, and a lot can happen in one scene,” she says. “Every single scene, there’s a shift of some sort. My character gets to do some pretty outlandish stuff, so that’s when I knew I had moments to shine, because I’m the comic relief.”

While the comedic scenes comes easily to Forrester (and provide the bulk of her material – her favourite recent moment being her trashing the IV bar), the big emotional stuff doesn’t come so naturally. “When my dad died on the show, I remember putting heaps of thought and effort into it,” she says. “The emotional ones where you have to cry or get kind of angry, I really know I’ve got to focus and not mess around on set and have a laugh. I really admire the actors who have to do that every day, because there are some characters who are just constantly in turmoil.”

“I’m really glad I’m not one of them, and I’m so glad I’m not a surgeon or doctor, because fuck remembering all of those medical terms.”

The other hard thing is the schedule, which Forrester compares to a moving train. In theory, Shortland Street is a 9-5 job. In practice, it’s a 9-5 job where an actor might not be scheduled for days at a time, but has to be available to rehearse and shoot at the drop of a surgical cap.

She learned very quickly not to organise anything on a Monday to Friday. “You’re sort of just available all the time, but sometimes it works in your favour too,” she says. “I had a huge storyline a couple of weeks ago, but now it’s not so heavy.” (For example: When we talk it’s just after noon on a Wednesday, and Forrester has already wrapped for the day.)

That moving train metaphor also applies to Forrester’s advice for people who are new to the show: just keep going, even when you think you’ve messed up. “There are so many cameras on you that it might not actually matter that you’ve made a mistake,” she says. “Have a blast, learn your lines, and try to keep believing in what you’re doing even if you’ve completely mucked it up.”

Tinihuia Lee-Lemon, who plays Tillie Samuels, on Shortland Street is one of the younger actors who find it easy to learn lines. (Photo: South Pacific Pictures)

Matt Dwyer, the co-founder of Barefoot Casting, has acted on the show and is currently a chaperone for the younger cast members. He believes the ability to learn lines is the main thing you need to be on Shortland Street. “The more you have your lines in your body and in your head, the more free you can be with the character,” he says.

That’s especially true for actors who might come in for a month, a week, or even a day of shooting. Shortland Street is one of the fastest-turnaround TV shows in the world, shooting roughly an episode a day, and the actors all have to keep up with that pace. “If you don’t have your lines down or your character placed, that can really upset the rhythm.”

Often the hardest thing he finds with actors, especially new actors, is getting them to relax. Shortland Street isn’t just a paid gig, nerve wracking enough as it is, it’s the paid gig, and could be an actor’s biggest paycheck in any given year. It’s also, with few exceptions, something an actor only gets one shot at. It has to count. “Of course every actor wants to come on and do a great job, and if they start feeling that they’re not doing a good job, it affects them, and the performance as well.”

Any actor under 16 on the show has to be chaperoned – essentially shadowed by a person, often a professional actor, who helps them learn their lines and looks after their general wellbeing in the fast-turnaround TV machine. “They can be so excitable, he says. “You’ve got to control the excitement levels. You get a group of teens together and the energy is quite full on at times.”

Surprisingly, the actors who find it the easiest to learn lines are often these younger ones. “Sometimes they’ll get scenes thrown at them, and they haven’t seen them or haven’t learned it, and we’ll go over them two or three times, and the lines are in,” he says. “We’re talking seven-year-olds, eight-year-olds, here.”

“It’s really exciting when you see really young kids, they can come in and just blow you away. There’s adults who can’t do that.”

Katherine McRae as Nurse Brenda Holloway on Shortland Street. (Photo: Supplied)

Katherine McRae has worked extensively on Shortland Street on both sides of the camera, as Nurse Brenda Holloway (RIP) and as a director for several years. For her, the most important skill is the ability to self-direct. An actor’s got to be able to bring it. “There’s little time to rehearse and very little time to shoot, so it’s fantastic when actors know their lines and really commit,” she says. “There’s no time to process. Pretty quickly, actors realise they’ve got to just front up.”

McRae believes that the speed can be as much of an advantage as it is a challenge. “At the end of the day when you’re trying to finish and not drop any scenes out of that day, you can knock off scenes incredibly quickly,” she says. The well-oiled nature of the show reveals itself as the cast and crew knuckle down to knock out, say, three scenes in three quarters of an hour.

“That’s super fast. But if you get a couple of actors on their A-game, and the crew, who are usually pretty calm, you can knock them out. Those can sometimes be the most exciting scenes.”

As an actor, McRae learned the importance of changing inside a scene. In theory, that’s pretty basic – any screenwriting guide will tell you that something has to change in a scene for it to work. On a show as tightly written as Shortland Street, that’s even more important. (Watch an episode and look at how much information is being communicated, often at rapid pace, in each scene.)

If Brenda had to end a scene angry, she would start the scene happy. “Rather than starting at mid-level and having to work myself into a grump, I would just drop the happiness. Now I’m grumpy!” She names Kiel McNaughton (Scotty) as another actor who helped her get to that place, and pushed her so she’d work herself up.

“I became a better screen actor once I’d been a director on the show, because I watched so many good actors! As a director, you’d be sitting in the edit going, ‘Oh thank you, that’s awesome. Loved the way you turned to camera at that moment. Perfect.’”

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Streaming
Show’s like Insider’s Guide to Happiness and Hounds have gone missing, almost without a trace. (Image: Archi Banal/Getty)

BusinessMay 25, 2022

We need another streaming service

Streaming
Show’s like Insider’s Guide to Happiness and Hounds have gone missing, almost without a trace. (Image: Archi Banal/Getty)

Many of New Zealand’s biggest and most expensive TV shows have vanished from air with no way for us to watch them. The solution is here — why won’t anyone fund it?

Will Hall remembers the moment he scored his first TV role clearly. In the early 2000s, the Christchurch-born actor moved to Australia in a bid to launch his career. But on a quick trip home Hall found himself bundled into the back of a mate’s mail plane, heading up to Auckland to audition for what would become his breakout role.

A casting agent had seen a photo, heard he was only in the country for a few days, and demanded they meet. “It happened by accident,” says Hall, who was thrust in front of the agent to read for the lead in a big budget local drama show. “She said, ‘Get him in, get him in now, he’s only here for two days, I think he’s our guy.'”

This is the dream come true for someone fresh out of acting school. “Sometimes it happens, and it only rarely happens — everything lines up and you’re the right fit for a character.”

Insider's Guide
Will Hall, left, with Madeleine Sami, Ben Barrington and the rest of the cast for Insider’s Guide to Happiness. (Photo: Gibson Group)

A few months later, Hall found himself sitting inside a car wash for two days, filming the opening episode of Insider’s Guide to Happiness, a 13-part series made by Gibson Group with $4,875,000 of funding from NZ on Air. In 2004, that amount placed it among the most expensive shows ever funded in New Zealand.

Dense scripts were based around an intriguing central theme: a car accident sparks a butterfly effect, sending eight 20-somethings onto different life paths that would eventually intertwine. Each character was on the hunt for happiness, and episodes posed questions: “Will the truth make you happy?” and “Do you deserve to be happy?”

“It sounds stupid now,” says Hall, who played the character of James, a foppish, happy-go-lucky chap from Whanganui. “I was stuck in this carwash. The spirit of a Tibetan monk was in this vase that got smashed on the road. It had to find somewhere to go, and it landed in me.”

Filmed in widescreen, with a filmic hue laid over the top, Insider’s Guide was Aotearoa’s answer to the prestige TV offerings coming out of America at the time, with cable networks like HBO scooping up viewers and winning Emmys with The Sopranos, The Wire and Six Feet Under. 

It worked. Hall’s character became a fan favourite, a second season was commissioned, and the show dominated the 2005 New Zealand Screen Awards, winning seven awards, including best show, and best actor for Hall. 

All that time, all those awards, all those memories, all that money. Right now, you can’t watch Insider’s Guide to Happiness, or its six-part sequel, Insider’s Guide to Love, anywhere. 

The series isn’t available on any local streaming services, and it hasn’t been for a very long time. Go digging and you’ll find episode two on YouTube and episode six on NZ On Screen, a local website dedicated to preserving Aotearoa’s screen history. That’s it, all that’s available of two seasons that cost taxpayers nearly $8 million.

Insider's Guide
Kate Elliott, right, in season two of Insider’s Guide to Happiness. (Photo: Supplied)

It isn’t the only local series to meet this fate. You can’t view many of the TV shows made in Aotearoa across the past two decades. Jackson’s Wharf ($3 million) isn’t available. Madeleine Sami’s super hit Super City ($2.5 million) can’t be streamed. Despite being available on TVNZ OnDemand until recently, all five seasons of Nothing Trivial ($20 million) have now disappeared. Most of the shows made by excellent local production house The Downlow Concept, including Hounds ($1.1 million) and Cover Band ($1.1 million) cannot be found.  

If you can remember it, you probably can’t watch it: The Cult ($6.5 million) is gone, Dirty Laundry ($6.8 million) has disappeared, and the same fate has fallen to This is Not My Life ($6.8 million), Orange Roughies ($9 million), Harry ($3.5 million), The Strip ($14 million) and Street Legal ($13.5 million). You also can’t watch most of Shortland Street’s 30 seasons, with only the last six months worth of episodes available via TVNZ OnDemand. As celebrations for the show’s 30th anniversary erupt this week — including an entire week dedicated to it on The Spinoff — being unable to revisit the glory days of Lionel Skeggins and Gina Rossi-Dodds seems like a real shame. 

Hall has a workaround, keeping a DVD copy of Insider’s Guide on his shelves at his Christchurch home. But even that doesn’t work right now. “My three-year-old … stuffed the PlayStation. He managed to stuff those Countdown Disney cards in it,” he laughs. Right now, the star of Insider’s Guide has no way to watch his own show.

What can be done about this? Someone has a crazy idea that might just work. But it’s going to cost money. A lot of money.

Over the past three years, a classic music documentary has been restored to its former glory. “It sat in the too hard basket for too long. It was time to take it out,” says Kathryn Quirk. The content director for NZ On Screen is talking about Give It A Whirl, the 2003 series covering the history of popular music in Aotearoa. 

It’s taken that long because rights for 167 songs needed to be approved, a laborious project of time-stamping tracks then reaching out to songwriters for approval. None of that is cheap. “We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars,” says Quirk.

Give it a Whirl
Give it a Whirl first screened in 2003.

All six parts of Give It a Whirl are finally available for viewing again, nearly 20 years after the show first went to air. But that’s just one show, and those delays and dollar signs are just some of the difficulties facing NZ On Screen. It’s not a streaming service; it’s a website built to showcase of New Zealand’s screen industry. Funding issues mean it runs on “the smell of an oil rag” with just three full-time staff, and a handful of part-timers. It also runs the music nostalgia website Audioculture.

Quirk details other issues, like problems accessing rights to TVNZ shows, and production companies refusing to offer up their titles for streaming. In most cases, it works like this: networks commission shows, producers make them, then the networks have exclusive broadcast and streaming rights for a set number of years, often up to three. After that, if they want to keep streaming them, they have to pay more. Residual payments to actors may also be applicable, depending on contracts.

NZ on Screen steps in hoping to scoop up shows streaming services no longer want. It’s a flawed plan. “It relies on whoever owns it … to be willing to give it to us for nothing,” says Quirk about acquiring content. “Sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not.” Producers hold onto shows in case a streaming service wants to pay them for it. “If they’re going to be able to earn revenue off it … they’re sure as hell not going to give it to us for free.”

Despite all of this, Quirk says NZ on Screen is thriving. More than a million people use the site every year, she claims, and it’s dedicating more time to acquiring full seasons, recently adding travel shows Intrepid Journeys and Ice to its library. People seek these shows out. The site’s numbers, she says, prove viewers want to see local content. “We don’t have an app, we don’t have the money, we’re so leanly funded,” she says, “but they’re great numbers.”

There is another option to grow. “The other thing we could potentially do … is expand into a pay model. The content owners would enjoy a share of revenue,” says Quirk. “Those talks are in progress.” Could this be the way forward, the solution for the avalanche of missing Aotearoa TV content?

Harry
Oscar Kightley and Sam Neill in the 2013 drama Harry. (Photo: Supplied)

Andrew Szusterman doesn’t think so. The managing director of South Pacific Pictures says producers need to get as much bang for their buck from their content as possible. (Recently, SPP sold streaming rights for The Almighty Johnsons and Step Dave to Neon.) He doesn’t believe demand for older shows is there, and says costly restoration projects are prohibitive. “Watching those shows on [high definition TV] sets and computers is just not an enjoyable experience visually and making quick conversions to stretch the content is just ugly,” he says. 

He also doesn’t believe a taxpayer-funded platform “where content sits in perpetuity” is a good business model. “It really comes down to the strategy of the operators … about what they believe library New Zealand content will do for their services.” By that, he means an expensive restoration project on Insider’s Guide isn’t worth the money given how many people are likely to actually watch it. 

NZ On Air’s head of funding Amie Mills also has similar doubts, questioning whether producers would support it. Music licensing, she points out, is “astronomically expensive”. NZ On Screen is the logical solution, yet “they’re not resourced or set up to do that”. Most of its funding comes from NZ on Air.

She wonders if TVNZ On Demand and Three Now’s platforms could be utilised further. “Is there audience desire or need for it?” she asks, warning, “It will come at a cost.” Despite Mills’ concerns, she can think of plenty of shows she’d like to view a second time, but isn’t able to. “I’d love to watch Harry again,” she says of Oscar Kightley’s hard-boiled police drama from 2013.

Quirk believes the time is right, suggesting audiences are mature enough to celebrate New Zealand’s televisual past — including its failures. Melody Rules was widely considered a disaster when it aired, but when a RNZ podcast examined its disastrous fallout, many wanted to revisit it. When Celebrity Treasure Island was revived last year by TVNZ, some were keen to relive the low budget first season from 2001 which had John ‘Cocksy’ Cocks and Dominic Bowden swimming through muddy ponds and digging up beaches for laughs. Just one episode of each is available for viewing through NZ On Screen.

cti
Frank Bunce and Nicky Watson search a murky lagoon in the 2001 season of Celebrity Treasure Island. (Screengrab: NZ On Screen)

In the meantime, Quirk’s been watching Hollywood rifling through its history books to find new ideas, like The Sopranos getting a Tony Soprano origin film, a prequel for The Wire called We Own This City, and a Six Feet Under reboot coming soon. She believes the same thing could happen to old shows here, but only if they’re available to stream.

“We’re so aware of it, we’re doing everything we can to make the shift,” she says. Money is the biggest problem, but buy-in from the industry is also crucial. “It’s not insurmountable. We’re well-positioned with the way our site’s built … we really hope we can.”

If it happened, Hall would no longer need to fix his PlayStation to watch Insider’s Guide again. While he’s proud of the work he did on season one, he’s less happy about his performance in season two. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he admits. But, warts and all, even he believes the series should be available for viewing. “I’m so proud of it,” he says. “I’d be happy to see it again.”

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