KAREN O’LEARY
Paranormal but very normal
Did you ever go to see a comedian, and then try to share the jokes with your friends the next day? There was an electric bike and Jemaine Clement in a ghost house. And oh, you really just had to be there.
That’s exactly what it is to interview Karen O’Leary. She makes you laugh and laugh and laugh, but like all the best comedians, when you’ve recovered your decorum, you’re not really sure why.
‘‘Jemaine [Clement], who is so well known, but he is actually kind of shy,’’ she says about working with the creator of the TV show Wellington Paranormal.
‘‘If any of the takes got ruined it was because of him, because he’s got this great laugh. He’d be behind, watching the screen and laughing like [O’Leary makes a noise like a pencil scribbling on paper] . . . I can hear your duck laugh, Jemaine . . . ’’
Does he sound like Muttley from Dastardly and Muttley? ‘‘More like [she rasps like Donald Duck] heh, yeah, that’s a better version of it.’’
I don’t know how I’m going to describe that laugh, Karen. ‘‘I don’t know either. But that’s not my job, my job is just to be a famous aaact-ooor.’’
Being a famous actor – on films like What We Do In the Shadows and spin-off series Wellington Paranormal – isn’t her day job though. O’Leary is a respected early childhood teacher.
She toyed with joining the police – like her eponymous character Officer O’Leary. But instead, she enrolled at Victoria University, dropping out of a politics degree after a year.
‘‘I guess I care what happens to people and politics is a vehicle for what things are going to have an influence on communities and society.’’
Her conversation is peppered with political references and she’s open to running for office.
‘‘I’d never say never, there is potential for that. I’d have to have a really, really good PA because I’m not very organised and I think politicians probably have to answer their emails . . . oh they don’t? . . . Put me down for the next election then. I’m going to make my own party.’’
She disagrees with most of National’s policies and says Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is ‘‘a breath of fresh air’’. But O’Leary is firmly behind teachers’ demands for better pay.
‘‘Full credit to them. I think [striking] is a really valid thing for them to do, in response to the conditions that they have been putting up with for years.
‘‘It was sad to hear the minister of education [Chris Hipkins] saying it is out of kilter with what everyone else is getting. It wouldn’t be out of kilter if they’d been getting what they deserve and what was appropriate before now.’’
Teaching almost didn’t happen for O’Leary – she was kicked out of training college. ‘‘I was in a position where I wasn’t really open to the notions of authority.
‘‘And there was a tutor that really questioned the legitimacy of being a homosexual and obviously I had an issue with this. So I raised the issue. I was very worried and frustrated, in a course where we were learning how to be really great teachers for children, that this notion of homosexuality being a bad thing was part of what we were listening to from a professional academic . . . I thought that was really wrong.’’
The profession was right, but the timing wasn’t, she says. A short stint with a commercially run early childhood centre ended with a payout when she challenged a bullying culture. ‘‘I think it’s really important. When things aren’t fair, I don’t like it when people aren’t nice to other people.’’
Then, a chance encounter on a bus landed her some relief work in a community-based centre. Seventeen years later, she now runs the centre out of a cosy suburban villa.
O’Leary, 40, is an ardent advocate of the value of early learning. ‘‘We are still seen as the poor cousin of education, but actually we should be seen as the kauma¯ tua – we are the ones who shape children who are confident, who can problem-solve and know how to learn.’’
She’s serious about the principles – but her lessons are a riot of fun and joy. ‘‘There are not many jobs when you turn up to work and you are greeted by people who are really happy to see you and you are happy to see them. I’d rather do that than fracking.’’
For sing-alongs, she becomes Captain Electric, a superhero in a silver cape with a guitar. He used to wear an orange jumpsuit:
‘‘I left it down in the basement at work and it got all mouldy.’’ He sings about scary Mrs O’Leary, and the wheels on the Wellington buses that no longer go round.
‘‘For children to learn at their best, if they are having fun they are learning way better than if they are not having fun.’’
O’Leary’s always been a performer, teaching herself to play guitar at the age of 10. But she only dipped her toes into acting when
the mother of one of her charges, casting director Tina Cleary, suggested an audition. She landed the part of Officer O’Leary in the now-cherished vampire mockumentary What We Do In the Shadows.
‘‘On the first day on the set, I was so nervous I thought I was going to be sick. Because I had no idea what I was doing and all of a sudden I was hanging out with bloody Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi – I mean you don’t just go and do that of a Saturday, do ya, and without knowing anything?’’
Her doltish on-screen partner is played by Mike Minogue. ‘‘You know when you just get on with someone straight away? He put me completely at ease because he was just so friendly. We had this silly banter, and then I fell asleep because I was so nervous. I started nodding off in the chair . . . and he took a photo, he’s still got that photo and he’s used it a couple of times to remind me.’’
The six-part spin-off Wellington Paranormal just finished an acclaimed run on TVNZ and seems likely to land a second series. The show sends up fly-on-the-wall copumentaries, and follows O’Leary and Minogue as they police demons, werewolves and the undead. The pair don’t write the scripts – but they do improvise.
‘‘Heaps. Jemaine is so open to that sort of thing. He’s certainly not a precious director. Sometimes the lines he’s written he’d be like: ‘What is this? That is terrible, I don’t like it.’
‘‘There is a really good mixture of really good scripted jokes, and then a lot of me and Mike bumbling our way through things.’’
Fans are calling for another film. ‘‘Witches, we haven’t done witches. Goblins, taniwha. Leprechauns. National Party politicians. A haunted Judith Collins. I’d be terrified. Sorry, Judith, I’ve never met you I shouldn’t say such things, I just don’t agree with some of your ideas. Most of them. All of them.’’
O’Leary won’t be moving to Hollywood, or even Auckland. Wellington is where she grew up and still lives with partner Kerryn, their two sons, and Daisy the dog.
She adores her parents, Steve and Ann, who live close by. And she still plays for the soccer team – Brooklyn Northern United – that she joined at 15. ‘‘Best club in New Zealand, probably. I used to play half-goal, half-striker so I could score the goals and then save the goals. But our other goalie went overseas so now I’m stuck in goal all the time.’’
In between teaching, soccer and doing the Stuff quiz (‘‘if we get below 12 we feel a little bit disappointed in ourselves’’), she’s also dabbled in kick-boxing. ‘‘Have I told you once I hit the captain of the women’s All Blacks? Farah Palmer. Yeah, she wasted me. She was dancing in my space. I was such a dick. I said to her: ‘You’re dancing in my space.’ I must send her a card to say sorry.’’
As for the electric bike? Well, you just really had to be there.
‘‘Children learn at their best if they are having fun.’’