Bennett’s thrilling ride to stardom
Human Traces’ star Vinnie Bennett talks to James Croot about growing up in Christchurch, working in the Catlins, and meeting Cuba Gooding Jr.
He might have been named as one of the world’s most exciting young acting talents, but Vinnie Bennett still finds it hard to watch his own work.
The 24-year-old Kiwi, who was named as one of four international ‘‘Rising Stars’’ ahead of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, admits that while he’s taken in his latest movie Human
Traces three times, he feels ‘‘like I haven’t seen the film’’.
‘‘As soon as I see myself on screen, it’s like the inner-dialogue starts in my head of what I could have done better – and it’s quite loud. It means you kind of miss parts, because you’re thinking back to what you did.’’
However, while Bennett has had trouble focusing in screenings, other more influential people have been paying close attention. No less than Variety magazine gave him big raps for his performance in Nic Gorman’s psychological thriller, with Richard Kuipers writing that he ‘‘justifies his rising star status at this year’s Toronto fest with a smouldering performance’’.
Essentially a three-hander, with Mark Mitchinson and Sophie Henderson as the other points of the plot’s triangle, Human Traces is the story of how the latter two’s married researchers’ lives are turned upside down by the arrival of Bennett’s mysterious young man.
When the charismatic Christchurch-raised performer and I meet, it’s at a small, abandoned bar in the middle of the movie mayhem that is the Toronto Film Festival.
It’s just one of the many repurposed venues used by publicists during the 11-day Canadian celebration of global cinema. It’s only just reached lunchtime, but Bennett has already been up for hours and is still in the middle of the whirlwind week of parties, meetings and opportunities that have accompanied his Rising Star ‘‘prize’’.
Clearly tired and still coming to terms with what’s happening to him, Bennett says what the Rising Star programme has done is ‘‘kind of defog the Hollywood illusion for me’’.
‘‘I guess, in New Zealand, the whole North American industry seems kind of intimidating. People kind of put it on a pedestal because the people involved are so powerful, but it was really good just to kind of chat with them and just have open and honest, straightforward, person-to-person conversations.’’
He laughs when he recounts how Human Traces producer Nadia Maxwell encouraged him to try out for the Rising Star programme, even though it was only supposed to be open to Canadians.
‘‘She just thought we should give it a go anyway. So I sent through some footage from Traces and other projects I’d done in New Zealand and, a few weeks later, I got an email saying I’d been accepted. This was all before they’d seen the film itself. I guess I can’t have been that bad.’’
But among all the chats with casting directors and speed dates with producers, three things about his time at the festival had stood out for him.
One was a talent lab run by New Zealand acting guru Miranda Harcourt, another was chatting with Family Ties star-turnedshort-film-director Justine Bateman. But the real highlight was a memorable encounter with an Academy Award-winning star.
‘‘I was hanging out the back of the InStyle party the other night, which was so exclusive it had 2.5 metre high hedges around it. A guy walks past wearing a red jacket and I say, ‘hey, nice jacket – oh, that is Cuba Gooding Jr’. One of my managers hears me and says, ‘would you like to meet him?’ And so he introduces me and Cuba says, ‘Hey Vinnie, how’s it going? It’s good to meet you. You know we’re going to another party and I guess we’re going to go now’. And he turns around, scales the hedge and flips himself over it. His manager is kind of left there with us and then just kind of follows him over the hedge. It was pretty awesome.’’
It’s a far cry from around a decade ago when a desperate mother sent a troubled young man to Christchurch’s Shirley Boys’ High School in the hopes of straightening him out. ‘‘I went to Aranui [High School] in Year 9 and I wasn’t the best behaved person at the time.’’
As well as reining him in, Shirley Boys was where he first discovered his love of drama, although it was a hard place for it to thrive.
‘‘Shirley was a big sports school so I used to go over to Marian [College, then the adjacent girls’ school] to do drama. But when I got to the end of Year 12, I was like, ‘what am I going to do with the rest of my life?’.’’
Fortunately a good friend of his, Teone Kahu, was facing a similar dilemma across town at St Thomas of Canterbury College and had already come up with a potential solution – Aranui’s Theatre Academy.
‘‘He said, ‘I’m going to go and try out for this’ and I was like, ‘you know what, I think I might do that as well’. So I kind of showed up a few days later, did a cold-read audition for this Shakespeare show and got cast as one of the major supporting roles. That was kind of a big thing for me.’’
After competing in the annual Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival, the pair were lucky enough to be asked by Academy teacher Robert Gilbert to join their Theatre Company. ‘‘We travelled around school all over New Zealand,’’ Bennett recalls, ‘‘and while we were in Auckland, Robert got in touch with us and said there was an agent who wanted to meet us’’.
Bennett admits he was a reluctant participant, but was persuaded to meet Imogen Johnson from Johnson & Laird. ‘‘I initially went back to Christchurch, but quickly discovered that apart from Whitebait [Productions] and The Court Theatre, there wasn’t much of an industry in a city just emerging from the devastation of the 2010-11 earthquakes.
‘‘I didn’t really want to get into construction, so I threw myself in my little Ford Laser, blasted off up the country to set up base in Auckland and, I guess, the rest is history.’’
Before Human Traces, that history included parts in Kiwi films Fantail and Beyond the
Known World, a regular role on much-maligned TVNZ drama
Filthy Rich and jobs on big-budget international productions The
Shannara Chronicles and Ghost in the Shell.
However, when he first heard about writer-director Gorman’s movie, he’d thought he’d missed his chance to play a part.
‘‘A friend of mine, who also went to Aranui, Pana Hema Taylor, told me about this project he’d been cast in. It sounded great. But then he suddenly had other commitments and I got a message from my agent saying they’d opened the casting back up and ‘did I want to have a read of the script and put an audition down?’
‘‘At the time, I had this technique where I wouldn’t read the full script, I’d just read the audition scene because I felt like I might force too much of the whole movie into that single scene. But learning the lines, I found I wanted to know more, so the night before the audition I read it and I was completely blown away. It went from being just another potential gig, to something that I really was passionate about and really wanted.’’
Back in Christchurch at that point, Bennett flew to Wellington to meet Gorman and do the audition, before facing an agonising week-long wait to learn whether he’d got the role.
Any joy was quickly shelved as soon as shooting started a few months later, though.
‘‘We shot the very last scenes of the film on the first day and then on the second day it was straight into the water at Akaroa Harbour. There was a massive swell and it was ridiculous trying to hold onto the boat and relax at the same time. It took all day and I got extremely sick after that.’’
The prospect of far more aquatic action in the chillier climes of the Catlins filled Bennett with dread, but fortunately the location team had an ace up their sleeve.
‘‘They had these kind of wetsuits that we could put on underneath, which made a big difference,’’ says Bennett. ‘‘I didn’t think they would, but they really, really helped.’’
The southern shoot also doubled as Bennett’s first visit to the isolated region, an area he now describes as ‘‘amazing’’.
‘‘It’s such an untouched part of the country, such a raw chunk of land that belongs more to the seals than it does to humans. It was intense. The weather there was insane. We had rain coming at us from all directions, it was the first time I’d ever tried to deliver a line when I couldn’t hear myself talk.
‘‘It was amazing and I think it really helped being down there because obviously we weren’t going to be able to go to a subAntarctic island, but I feel that this like the closest thing to it.‘‘
Proud of the film, if still not necessarily sure about his own performance, Bennett says that despite the doors that have opened to him around the world as a result of being a Toronto ‘‘Rising Star’’, he’s made a pact to work again with Gorman.
‘‘I’m going to stick close to Nic because I really admire his style and that he pushes the boundaries a bit.’’
Gesturing towards a bulging wallet, Bennett says it will take him a while to sort through all the cards he’s gathered. And having already secured a North American management team – Primary Wave – he will spend a few weeks in Toronto mulling over his next move.
‘‘I’ve met some pretty amazing people and now I hope to take advantage of the magic dust that’s been sprinkled on me.’’
❚ Human Traces (M) opens in select New Zealand cinemas on November 16.
"I've met some pretty amazing people and now I hope to take advantage of the magic dust that's been sprinkled on me."
Vinnie Bennett