Digging the dirt
The stars of TVNZ’s expensive new drama tell Jack van Beynen it will pay dividends.
It starts like any other family gathering. The family members come through the front door, they shake hands and hug and kiss cheeks. There’s news to deliver: an engagement, a house has been bought. Then the police arrive. This is one of the first scenes the cast of TV One’s new drama, Dirty Laundry, filmed.
Jennifer Ward-Lealand, who plays the family matriarch, says the scene was also when she knew the show was going to work.
She and the other cast members rehearsed it several times while the crew waited outside. Straight away she found there was a ‘‘lovely ease’’ to the group, and that flowed into the scene. Their rehearsal was messy. People were reaching over each other and talking over each other. It was just like any other family gathering.
‘‘It was just so easy to wrap my arms around them, you know?’’ Ward-Lealand says. ’’We believe this is a family, we believe the dynamic.’’
The family is the Raffertys, and Ward-Lealand’s character is Donna, the dedicated, protective mother of the clan. Donna’s not what she initially appears to be, however. When the police show up, the Rafferty children are shocked to discover their comfortable middle-class lifestyle has been supported by their mother’s money-laundering activities. Dirty Laundry traces the aftershocks of this revelation.
The show received $6.7 million in New Zealand On Air funding, and comes from the well-worked pens of Outrageous Fortune creator Rachel Lang and Go Girls‘ Gavin Strawhan. The pair also worked together on TV2 soap Filthy Rich.
Ward-Lealand is joined in the cast by Tai Berdinner-Blades, who plays Kat, one of Donna’s adult children and an ambitious commercial lawyer.
‘‘You would say at first that personality-wise Donna and Kat are quite different, but in the end we find out they’re much more similar than we thought,’’ WardLealand says.
Ward-Lealand’s role was a testing one for the veteran of 35 years on stage and screen. She was touring with a play at the time of filming, so had to cram her scenes - most of which were shot while her character was in prison - into spare days between performances.
The job wasn’t done once she’d finished her scenes, either. WardLealand then had more lines to learn. How does an actor cope with that kind of workload? WardLealand says it’s all about discipline and time management. If time is limited you’ve got to use every spare gap you’ve got.
‘‘The job doesn’t finish once you’ve done a 12-hour shoot day or whatever, the job doesn’t finish because as the actor you’re going home and learning lines on top of that. Because you can’t hold up anyone else.’’
Berdinner-Blades says memorising lines becomes like a muscle. By the end of shooting she only needed five minutes to know a scene.
Part of the reason Dirty Laundry heaped so much work on its cast was that it was shot very quickly. Berdinner-Blades says the key to dealing with her workload was working smart.
‘‘I think especially with a show that is fast turnaround, which is predominantly what we make in New Zealand, you have to kind of work smart, rather than spending three months at a law office trying to be a lawyer. It’s kind of that thing of what do I get for free, and what do I have to work on. That’s kind of my philosophy around acting as well.’’
There was one element of the show where the cast did need educating: money laundering. The producers arranged for cast members to have a ‘‘money laundering 101’’ session to learn the fundamentals. That wasn’t the only brush Ward-Lealand had with the wrong side of the law to prepare for her role. Because her character spends most of her onscreen time incarcerated, Lealand-Ward had to study up on life in prison - an ‘‘interesting’’ experience.A lthough Ward-Lealand is much more law abiding than the fraudster she plays, they do have lots in common. Both are multi-taskers, able to juggle ‘‘about 10 balls in the air’’. And like Donna, LealandWard is very protective of her family.
‘‘The fact that [Donna has] done all this without the family knowing is testament to her protectiveness of her family, her dedication to her family being happy.’’
Berdinner-Blades says that although she’s not that similar to the ruthless, ambitions Kat, she did find throughout the shoot that aspects of her character’s personality bled into her own.
‘‘I became a lot more organised, I don’t know what it was but everyone thought I was older than I am, which Kat is,’’ she says. ‘‘I guess it’s just a state of mind. I spent more time as Kat than I did as Tai.’’
Berdinner-Blades calls the show a ‘‘family drama’’, although she says it took her and others working on the show some time to figure that out.
‘‘It was funny with this show because we were all trying to figure out along the way what the show was. And that was from the writers to the directors to the actors, everybody was kind of milling around in the dark trying to find the light switch, as it were, as to what this show was.’’
For her, the complexity of Dirty Laundry‘s characters is what makes the show worth watching.
‘‘I think one of the great things about the writing of this show is that everyone’s very flawed. There’s no saints or villains.’’
Dirty Laundry, Wednesdays 8.30pm, TV ONE.