The great unknown
Actor and casting director Neill Rea plays a leading role in The Brokenwood Mysteries, as detective senior sergeant Mike Shepherd. Rea, who is in his mid-40s, is pictured aged 20, on the beach in Goa, India, on a holiday following his second year at univ
“I’d kind of scrimped and saved all year, worked several part-time jobs. Me and a mate went through southeast Asia and ended up in India. That’s on the beach in Goa. We met up with another friend of mine who was an expat in Mumbai. That day, we’d hired bikes and done a big ride along the beach. I can’t actually remember why I decided to hurdle the bikes, but it made for a good photo.
The photo kind of reminds me of a carefree younger self, but when everything was probably also more chaotic and dangerous, I think. When we first got to Goa, we’d gone to a bar at the seaside and I’d met the kind of quintessential ageing American hippie, who was drinking a beer and smoking what I thought were bidis – vine leaf tobacco rolls – and he kind of offered it to me as I was chatting to him. It was hash and baccy.
Maybe a week and a half beforehand, the guy I was travelling with – Mark – we went through a train station in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Mark was sick, and I went out onto the platform when we stopped to get him some chai. There was a riot going on. I think VP Singh was the premier and he was trying to introduce some positive discrimination policies for lower caste people, and quite a few Brahmin were protesting.
The conductor really quickly ushered me back on to the train. I found out the next day, when we arrived in Mumbai to stay with friends before heading to Goa, that people had been killed in the riots on that platform.
We went to the Taj Mahal – beautiful, an amazing place – and you go round the back and the Yamuna river flows behind it. There was a dog eating something down by the river. You go: “Oh what’s that?“It was a human corpse. And you go: “Ah.” The other thing that photo reminds me of is, I need to do some yoga.
The new series of The Brokenwood Mysteries begins tomorrow on Prime at 8.30pm.