Doctor at last:

Shortland

Street’s Ryan O’Kane has finally fulfilled his aim of being a doctor.

Actor Ryan O’Kane’s best friend from school is now a doctor and O’Kane once thought he may join him down that career path. But although acting lured O’Kane away from medicine, he has now happily taken on a medical role, thanks to Shortland Street. Kerry Harvey reports.

If he hadn’t become an actor, Ryan O’Kane would probably have been a doctor. More than a decade later, he is doing both – as Shortland Street’s newest emergency department specialist.

“When I was at school, I was trying to work out in seventh form what a respectable, good, fun job would be and I think I’d watched too many episodes of ER,” O’Kane says, adding he initially planned to join his best friend at medical school.

While his mate continued down that path, O’Kane decided he was better suited to acting and enrolled to study at Toi Whakaari, the New Zealand Drama School.

“But I said to him at the time, ‘You do your seven or eight years and I’ll go the acting route and let’s see who becomes a doctor first’. He had seven years of med school but he still beat me by about two years,” O’Kane says.

O’Kane served his medical internship playing Dr Riley Hawkins, former boyfriend of Dr Tori Morgan (Penny McNamee), on Australia’s Home And Away last year and is now playing Ferndale’s newest doctor, Dylan Reinhart, who is also the new

husband of Nurse Kylie Brown’s (Kerry-Lee Dewing) sister, Julia (Jessica Joy Wood). “Now I’m calling my friend in Wellington once a week to run all the medical jargon by him and he, in amongst bouts of laughter, corrects me on my pronunciation,” O’Kane says. “It’s really informative. I’m giving him phrases and he’s telling me what that means, where that originated and what I’m actually doing (on screen). It’s quite educational.” His role on Shortland Street is something of a homecoming for O’Kane who, unlike many of his peers, headed overseas without serving time in Ferndale. “I didn’t want to walk the beaten track. I thought ‘Why not just walk it backwards?’,” he says, laughing. The now 35 year old won a Qantas best-actor award for his first-ever role, playing a criminal in 2006’s Insiders Guide To Love, and went on to make television drama The Hothouse and the movies Secondhand Wedding and Tangiwai, before moving to Australia for a regular role on the police drama City Homicide. More recently, he has played cricketer Jeff Thomson in Howzat: Kerry Packer’s War, Prince Frederick in Mary: Making Of A Princess, and was also in Brock, and Rage, the local drama about the 1981 Springbok tour. The decision to return to New Zealand followed his wedding to fellow actor, makeup artist and former Shortland Street alumni Jazmyne van Gosliga this year.

The couple have lived in Wellington, Melbourne, Sydney and Los Angeles and are now relishing the chance to put down roots in Auckland.

“We’ve lived a bit of a gypsy life but it’s nice to be able to have some walls to put some paintings up on if we want,” O’Kane says. And while he might be the new boy on Shortland Street, he is no stranger to many of his co-stars.

“I knew Ria Vandervis (who plays Harper) from Dunedin, Shane Bunkall (Dr Boyd Rolleston) was two years under me at Toi Whakaari, and I worked with Sally Martin (Nicole Miller) on a show called Welcome To Paradise,” O’Kane says, adding he was also acquainted with Ben Barrington (Dr Drew MacCaskill), Jessica Joy Wood and Laurel Devenie (Kate Nathan).

“It’s just like working with a bunch of friends but there were definitely still first-day nerves.

“It’s one of those weird things where it was my first day but no one else’s and you have thoughts like, ‘How do you act again?’ but they didn’t last very long.”

O’Kane is relishing his time as Dylan and finds his foray into medicine a welcome change after a long run of police dramas.

“Dylan has some great storylines. He comes in as a GP but he is an ED consultant as well – a jack of all trades in many ways,” O’Kane says.

“He certainly doesn’t slip in under the radar. He causes issues with a few people.

“He rubs Drew the wrong way initially but he’s also a very good university friend of Boyd. It’s the new-kid-at-school kind of thing.”

“I didn’t want to walk the beaten track. I thought ‘Why not just walk it backwards?’ ”

– Ryan O’Kane