ScreenTalk

Actor, acting teacher, and artist Grant Tilly has played cow cockies, assassins, missionaries, and German villains in funny hats. And that’s not even counting his long-running stage career, which has included a run of classic Kiwi plays, one of which became acclaimed movie Middle Age Spread.

In this ScreenTalk interview, Tilly talks about:

• how people sometimes still recognise him from 60s TV show Joe’s World, and the topics he was told never to mention on early series In View of the Circumstances
• acting in 70s mega production The Governor, and the challenges of competing on screen against his bad haircut
• being allowed to go solo by director John Reid while making two farmers and a dead Dad comedy Carry Me Back, for a memorable scene in which his character finally tells his father what he really thinks of him
• squaring off against Men in Black star Tommy Lee Jones for a fight scene in movie epic Savage Islands
• how his career as an actor, stage designer, and co-founder of Wellington’s Circa Theatre has intersected with the works of writer Roger Hall – including his acclaimed performance as a philandering headmaster in Middle Age Spread
• playing a repressed accountant who becomes obsessively interested in a masseuse in movie Skin Deep
• the challenges of portraying real life people on screen
• the similarities between war and movie-making

This video is available on YouTube to embed and distribute via a Creative Commons licence.

Miranda Harcourt got her screen break playing the bitchy Gemma on iconic 80s soap Gloss. Since then the versatile Harcourt has hardly taken a break – directing, teaching, plus acting in prisons, tele-movie Clare, and feature film For Good, among many other titles.

In this ScreenTalk interview, Miranda Harcourt talks about:

• the joys of playing Gemma on Gloss, as the character journeyed from being a “really nice girl from Hamilton” to a “bitch from hell”
• the over-the-top reactions of some Gloss viewers when they met Harcourt in person
• reinvention in London
• interviewing prisoners about violent crime and murder for Verbatim. Harcourt performed the play in prisons across New Zealand, as seen in Shirley Horrocks documentary Act of Murder
• the genesis of award-winning feature film For Good – directed by Harcourt’s husband Stuart McKenzie – the tale of a woman’s fascination with a teenager’s abduction and murder
• playing Phillida Bunkle in tele-movie Clare, based on the disastrous gynaecological study at Auckland National Women’s Hospital
• her time as a “terrible” student at New Zealand Drama School, and her return to spend seven years at the school as head of acting
• embracing variety in her career, including her recent work as acting coach on Yvonne Mackay’s series Kaitangata Twitch

This video is available on YouTube to embed and distribute via a Creative Commons licence.

Credits: Direction and Interview – Ian Pryor.  Camera and Editing – Alex Backhouse