Devine casting: Familiar face returns to Shortland Street.
Time hasn’t been kind to Shortland Street’s Emily Devine. After a gap of almost 25 years, the once brilliant doc is back but nothing like her old self. Kerry Harvey reports.
Shortland Street’s Michaela Rooney knows how to play the long game better than most.
Rooney, who played geeky pathologist Dr Emily Devine from 1995 to 1997, now works behind the scenes coming up with storylines and scripts for the local drama.
However, at the moment she is back on screen, reprising the role that once made her a household name. But she’s playing a very different Emily to the gifted pathologist who was Chris Warner’s (Michael Galvin) med school buddy.
Homeless, suffering dementia and, it turns out, Leanne’s (Jennifer Ludlam) worst nightmare, Emily creates a furore when she turns up in the emergency department seeking treatment for a sore leg.
Unbeknown to viewers, Rooney made her return a year ago as the homeless ‘man’ who Leanne pushed down the stairs at the IV and then, believing her victim was dead, stashed the body behind a dumpster.
The hospital receptionist has lived in fear ever since of being charged with attempted murder and Emily’s return spikes her terror levels.
“I did play that homeless person. It was me who (Leanne and Damo) lifted up and it was me they threw behind the dumpster. But I wasn’t credited because we wanted to keep it a secret as to who it was that was coming back,” Rooney says, adding while she knew from the outset the storyline would surface again, she didn’t expect it to take so long.
“Jen took quite a break from the show and I was away overseas and it just became really difficult.
“It was supposed to be six months but because of availability and because she had to be there because it was her story, it actually took longer to do than we had anticipated.”
Emily Devine with her big glasses and unflattering hairstyle first arrived in Ferndale to work at the clinic and moved in with old friend Chris.
The show’s writers teased a possible romance between the pair but, according to Rooney, Emily was not attractive enough for Dr Love. She eventually moved to Switzerland after being headhunted by a pharmaceutical company.
Rooney has since combined acting – including roles in Power Rangers, Agent Anna and The Brokenwood Mysteries – with storylining and writing Shortland Street scripts.
“Various producers have pitched ideas to me about Emily coming back but I just wasn’t that keen. Then our current story editor put an idea to me about Emily having dementia and being homeless and that really tugged at my heartstrings,” she says.
“I thought, ‘Well we could do this story with anybody but it does have an extra layer of poignancy because she was so brilliant and now she’s lost her marbles’.”
Despite her familiarity with the character, Rooney was apprehensive about returning to acting on what is such a fast-filming TV series.
“I was quite intimidated by it,” she says. “I have kept acting but not to anything like the degree you are required to do for Shortland Street. I had to know my lines thoroughly before I went on because I didn’t feel match fit to do it.”
She filmed her first scene in mid-March. “And that afternoon Jacinda put the country into lockdown and we all went home. I wasn’t expecting Shortland Street to go back until level two so I was completely on holiday, wasn’t even giving it a second thought, and then got a call to say, ‘We’ve gone into level three and we are actually going back to filming’. I ended up filming all my scenes during lockdown,” Rooney says. While it is common now for Ferndale favourites to move from in front of the camera to behind it, Rooney was the first to do so. She joined as a storyliner about a year after Emily Devine went to Switzerland and has been there ever since. Consequently, she knows more about what is in store for each character than the actors who play them.
“Sometimes I would say things on set like, ‘We should probably be doing it like this because actually this story is going this way’.
“It does pull everyone up for a moment because naturally they think the show starts when the scripts arrive in their hand but we’ve been working on them for weeks and weeks before that ...
“We know the future of the characters, we know each of them intimately. We know their stories so well.”