Fong takes a big bite of TV
Friday Night Bites star tells Shaun Bamber how weird things tend to happen to her.
All of a sudden, it seems like actress JJ Fong is everywhere. Making her debut appearance on Shortland Street the same week she pops up in The Brokenwood Mysteries, Fong also continues to star in Friday Night Bites, a spinoff from the web series Flat3, which she co-created with Roseanne Liang, Perlina Lau and Ally Xue.
The foursome have so far produced 15 instalments of Friday Night Bites, 10 of which are currently available for viewing on TVNZ OnDemand, where a new episode premieres every Friday.
Fong can’t say much about her Shortland Street role, but she does reveal that her character is a ‘‘funloving’’ surgical nurse named Ruby Flores, who hails from the Philippines.
She also lets slip that she’ll be involved in the Christmas cliffhanger somehow, and that she’s shot a lot of scenes with Lukas Whiting, who plays handsome surgeon Finn Connelly, son of Chris Warner and heir apparent to the ‘Dr Love’ title once attached to his father.
In some ways, working on Shortland Street is a return to the familiar for Fong, who has starred in Go Girls and Step Dave, also from the South Pacific Pictures (SPP) production stable.
In other ways however, the experience couldn’t be more different for the 30-year-old actress.
‘‘It is a machine,’’ says Fong of Shortland Street. ‘‘It is so different to any of the other SPP shows I’ve done like Step Dave or Go Girls – so different. It’s the churn. It’s the fastest shooting show in the world – an AD told me that and I was like, ‘Whoa’.
‘‘We shoot an episode a day, five episodes a week, and they edit on the go as we’re shooting. Normally on an SPP show we’d shoot a scene in maybe an hour – on Shorty we shoot a scene in 20 minutes. That’s how fast it is.’’
For now that’s all she can say really about Shortland Street. But there’s plenty to talk about when it comes to Friday Night Bites.
Funded by NZ On Air to the tune of $100,000, the 26-episode web series sees Fong and co-stars Lau and Xue reprising their Flat3 characters, only in shorter ‘bites’ and with – if this is possible – even quirkier storylines.
Friday Night Bites episodes are often based on real-life incidents experienced by Fong and her collaborators – as was the case with a particular Flat3 instalment that she couldn’t resist sharing.
The episode involved Fong’s character Jessica, who is standing on the street waiting for a bus when a carload of young guys pull up thinking she’s a prostitute.
Apparently the exact same thing happened to Flat3/Friday Night Bites writer-director Roseanne Liang, who also wrote and directed the autobiographical feature film My Wedding And Other Secrets.
‘‘That actually happened to Roseanne,’’ confirms Fong. ‘‘She was standing on the corner of Hobson St – and she’s married, she was married when this happened – and this car of guys, like real young guys, pulled up and they were asking her how much.
‘‘When she told us I was like, ‘What the hell Roseanne?’ And she was like, ‘I know, it was just weird’. I think she was just like, ‘I’m not a prostitute’.
‘‘So we put that in the series because it was so funny. And also because it’s just so terrible. And also Roseanne’s like, she has two children and a husband, and she’s like, ‘It’s kinda great that, you know ...’’’
That might perhaps be the most memorable real-life incident that the Flat3 Productions team has translated to the screen, but it’s certainly not an isolated case.
‘‘For some reason, us three [Fong, Lau and Xue] just end up having the weirdest moments – it’s like we get ourselves into really weird situations,’’ says Fong.
‘‘We went to VidCon this year, we went to LA and all travelled together for the first time, and the whole trip was like an episode, just little things that happened, and we were like, ‘Ohmigod, we could write about this’.’’ Which is exactly what they do. ‘‘Often when we’re all catching up and hanging out and someone tells a story, that’s when Roseanne’s like, ‘We have to write that down, that’s really funny, that could be an episode’.’’