Deadly attraction:
He may have murdered two wives, but Shortland Street actor Ryan O’Kane still maintains his character isn’t a horrible person. Kerry Harvey reports.
He might be a wifekiller, but Ryan O’Kane says there’s still lots to love about his Shortland Street character.
He’s probably the most hated man in Ferndale but Ryan O’Kane (left) still hopes he’ll win fans over. “I don’t see Dylan as a necessarily horrible person. However, I can see how he is perceived that way,” says the actor, who plays manipulative wife-killer Dr Dylan Reinhart. Viewers haven’t been slow at coming forward with their opinions. The show’s Facebook page is bursting with comments like, ‘Can the guy who killed Clint, kill Dylan please’ and ‘I’m really hating Dylan’. “I had a look at some of the comments and was genuinely surprised. Really, people having these reactions,” says O’Kane, who admits he usually leaves monitoring social media to his wife, actress Jazmyne van Gosliga. “She goes through all the Facebook posts and picks out certain ones to reply to. If she feels anyone’s gone too far she might just comment and suggest this is a character. And I love that. She’s very quick to jump to my – and Dylan’s defence – which is lovely.” O’Kane, who has worked extensively in Australia – including a stint on Home And Away – is relishing playing Shortland Street’s latest villain and, even though he’s murdered one, and possibly two wives, doesn’t see Dylan as evil. “I don’t like to think of him as a villain. I just think Dylan is a guy who knows exactly what he wants,” he says.
“He can be genuinely funny, very caring and very nice. His catalyst is Kylie (Kerry-Lee Dewing). Whenever you bring Kylie into any Dylan situation, he just becomes so blinkered and focused on her that everything else falls away. ”
Dylan had just married Kylie’s sister Julia (Jessica Joy Wood) when he met Kylie and was immediately smitten. He engineered his wife’s death in a car crash – eerily echoing the death of his first wife Stephanie – and is now biding his time before pursuing the woman he sees as his soulmate – and God help anyone who gets in his way, especially her husband Frank Warner (Luke Patrick).
“Frank should not be turning his back on anyone. He should have one eye in the back of his head the whole time, definitely,” O’Kane says.
Nevertheless, he is surprised some viewers are suggesting Dylan is the masked rapist currently terrorising the women of Ferndale.
“I don’t think he hates women at all and I certainly don’t think he has that primal need to seek out what the masked attacker is seeking out,” the actor says, admitting even those closest to him have raised the issue.
“I got a voice message from my father saying, ‘Listen, your mother has a very important question she needs to ask you. Can you please call back?’ So I called thinking, ‘What’s happened?’ and mum said, ‘OK, I just need you to be honest. There’s a few people at school have asked. I don’t care if you are but I need to know, are you the rapist?’ I had to tell her the truth.” While O’Kane isn’t prepared to reveal that secret, he is relishing the fact that Dylan is brutally honest about having killed Julia – even though no one takes his repeated confessions seriously. “I love that. I love the fact that he is just stating exactly what he’s done right out in the open,” he says. “We’re filming some scenes this week and there is a line– I think it is said to Dylan – but it is, ‘People see what they want to see and people hear what they want to hear’. “If someone says, ‘I killed that person’ it doesn’t compute so when Dylan says to people, ‘I killed Julia,’ they go, ‘No, of course you didn’t, it’s not your fault’. It’s wonderful. It’s the best of both worlds. He’s able to confess and exorcise those demons and at the same time” O’Kane hopes it is a long time before Dylan is unmasked– and in the interim hopes fans will come to appreciate him. “What I really hope is that people might actually come to like him – so he becomes an anti-hero – in the same way people like Bryan Cranston’s character Walter White in Breaking Bad or Tony Soprano,” he says. “You end up rooting for these characters even though they’ve done awful things. I would love at some point to catch an audience member saying something like, ‘I really hope that he gets out of this.’ It would be wonderful.”