Betting on Rima Te Wiata:
Rima Te Wiata guest stars in Kiwi drama Westside as a bookie named Iris. She tells Sarah Nealon about why she initially turned down the part.
Upping the stakes in Westside.
Anyone who watched local television in the 80s and 90s will probably remember Rima Te Wiata’s impersonations of famous New Zealanders.
On satirical shows such as Issues and More Issues, Te Wiata and fellow actor Mark Wright would pretend to be then television news anchors Judy Bailey and Richard Long.
Te Wiata also did a great take-off of Helen Clark. In real life, the actress, on different occasions, met both Clark and Bailey.
“Helen Clark said I didn’t look like I looked on the telly and I said, ‘Neither do you’,” says Te Wiata.
“Judy Bailey was absolutely gorgeous. She wasn’t mad on the idea of me doing impersonations of her and stuff but she understood it was part of my job and what I had to do.”
London-born Te Wiata has been acting since her teens with roles in TV, film and theatre. She has worked here and abroad. In Australia she was in a popular 1990s comedy series Full Frontal with Jennifer Ward-Lealand and in the decade before that she played nerdy Janice in the soap Sons And Daughters.
In the past few years she has appeared
in Kiwi films such as Hunt For The Wilderpeople, Pork Pie and The Breaker Upperers.
Te Wiata’s mother, Beryl, was an actress and her father, Inia, was an opera singer who died when she was eight years old. Te Wiata is also a singer.
She was on tour in Australia with the show ENZSO singing Split Enz songs accompanied by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra when she was approached to appear in Westside. At first she turned down the role. “They wanted me to audition and I thought, ‘I haven’t got time to learn it’ because it was a really long audition piece.
“Then they came back and said, ‘Look, all right, we really want you to do it’.”
Te Wiata plays Iris, a bookie who works out of the local pub and does business with Ted West (David de Lautour).
“She’s a little bit shady and wants Ted to do all her dirty work for her basically,” she says. “And he’s very good at that sort of thing, so she talks him into it.”
Unlike many cast members who weren’t even alive in 1983 – the year Westside is set – Rima was a young adult at the time and can remember what was fashionable then.
She had a say in what her Westside character wore.
“There was a thing where you’d go to op shops and get a pair of men’s trousers. You’d take in the legs down the bottom so they were puffy up the top but drainy down the bottom,” she recalls.
“They got an old pair of trousers and did exactly that. That was fantastic. (I wear) long jackets and I’ve got a chain with a giant safety pin that’s got weird stuff around it. I actually wanted to look a bit tatty rather than this finished piece.”
In the 2017 New Year’s Honours, Te Wiata was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to film and television.
You can’t help ask, with her previous experience in television comedy, do we need more satire on the box these days?
“No, but that was also partly to do with – and this happened in Australia too – the defamation of character thing people started doing so it became harder and harder to make satire,” she says.
“I do think that political satire is important but people’s sense of humour has altered as well.
“In the general public there is a different awareness that if you lampoon a politician it might be seen as bullying.
“So there are all kind of different factors that have come into play since the 70s, 80s and 90s with what people used to find hysterically funny, but now our political situations are so complex and internationally tied up and actually quite dark.
“You can’t really make jokes about a lot of this stuff. It’s not just domestic light stuff.”