Now let's talk about a film we’ve seen some interesting pictures from, Sci-Fi Betty.
That was great. Sci-Fi Betty was like a short film about a completely fictional story about Bettie Page. And I played Peggy Lee and then one of my best friends Nigel and I got to dress up in our underwear [laughs] in the middle of town at about 6 am on a Friday or Saturday morning right out on the street. And everyone thought it was great to have all these people coming home from being out all night and going ‘What the hell are they doing?’ [laughs] But yeah, it was like a little biopic, but a fictional one, based on Bettie Page. It was great.
Your friend Nigel, that would be Nigel Carboon, also known as Miss Honey Nougat?
Miss Honey Nougat was his alter-ego. He actually worked on Xena and Hercules. He was in the wardrobe department. But he has a cross dressing alter-ego called Miss Honey Nougat and honestly, she was beautiful but very demanding. [laughs] Very demanding.
In This Present Tense you played a character named…Miss Sexy Eyes. An obvious case of type-casting.
I know. They offered me the role and I couldn’t refuse. [laughs] It was basically a short with about a hundred or so characters in it. It was very short and it had a little story to go with it, but I can’t remember what it was. It was just another short.
On to Catch A Bullet. You were a character named Jane.
Catch a Bullet was done by a first time director and it was basically about this hit woman called Jane and he pitched it as the girl from The Professional grown up. So I was hooked! [laughs] Because I’ll take any kind of correlation to Natalie Portman I can get. [laughs] And I got to work with another New Zealand actor Stephen Lovatt who I’d never done anything with before. It was like all my childhood fantasies rolled into one very short film.
Could you tell us more about the type of character Jane is? People love the pictures of you from this film, with your gun and all.
[laughs] I know. It was outrageous. The character was a hit woman, kind of like a baddie, and it wasn’t really developed more than that for this short. As I say, it was a short film, basically a pitch for the directors to try and get funding for bigger ideas that they have. And that’s what you do really, to make something that’s self-funded in order to get the window of opportunity for people to see stuff in order for them to give you the trust and opportunity to do something more.
part 3