‘MY TIME IS ENDING’
Actor Michael Hurst talks to Kim Knight about how the world is changing for men
Michael Hurst is pissed and pissing. A bottle in his hand, a bucket at his feet. Sweet relief and it’s hard to know which is sweeter.
He sways. Swings his coat. “The sheer weight of it,” he says and the sentence buckles under an heavy Irish “r”. The actor stops. Does it again. Stops. “Except it’s not that heavy,” he says, considering the coat, which, according to the script and the label sewn into the collar, belongs to a dead man. His voice is back to normal. Pleasant timbre, excellent annunciation, segueing from stage to true story. Once, Hurst informs the director who is wearing shorts and bare feet, he bought a green leather jacket from a man at a pub who was selling on behalf of the deceased’s estate. Life imitates art. Art is Hurst’s life.
The actor has been in more than 100 theatre productions. His film and television credits run to pages. He’s forever referenced as the made-itin-America sidekick on Hercules: The legendary
journeys, but he was already 37 — practically middle-aged — when he did that. Back then, he liked to do his own stunts, a teenage fencing champion who grew into a man who could co-choreograph a Shakespearean fight scene with 450 individual moves. He’s 61 now. His knees are giving him hell.
TONIGHT, HURST is Danny Moffat — “an ageing Irish raconteur retreating from the harsh light of the world to his bedroom”, according to the Auckland Theatre Company billing for The Daylight Atheist, the play Tom Scott wrote about
his father.
“Basically, Tom is presenting a selective and jaundiced view of Dad,” says Hurst. “And I’m not saying it’s unjust or anything, because clearly I’ve read his [Scott’s] autobiographies so far, and clearly his dad was like a lot of those mid-20th century men. F***ed up, basically, by his upbringing, church, parents — non-parenting — so his dad had a lot of problems and took them out on his family.
“Think of all the poets and artists and writers and especially the men, who had terrible lives and no counselling to help them through it and inherited a just intolerable situation of escape via booze ...”
We could talk about this play (and we do) but it is more interesting, perhaps, to talk AROUND this play: fathers and fatherhood. What it means to be a man.
“There’s this guy, and at the end of the play, where is he? Well, he’s on his own ... he’s not kept up, he’s isolated and lonely and living in the past.”
Hurst lists real-life parallels: Donald Trump (one of those men who “explode on everyone else”). Mike Pence. Don Brash. Even closer to home: “Roger Hall, the other day, getting into trouble ... I’m sorry Roger, but what have you done?” (What playwright Hall did was write a letter to the editor conflating the female response to the murder of British tourist Grace Millane with a call for women to reduce the number of fetal alcohol syndrome cases recorded each year. Social media hated it.) Hall told Canvas “part of me wishes I hadn’t written it, but it is an issue that seems to have been hidden under the carpet for too long.”)
“I’m hoping that those men are like dinosaurs. And they are going. Because their world is not the new world,” says Hurst.
“We do not live in this world anymore, the world of Danny Moffat and this play. It’s changing more rapidly now, in the last 10 years, I reckon, than it ever has, and here they come, they’re all coming, the oncoming hordes and what are they? They are gender fluid, they are looking for gender equality. They don’t do the things that we did.”
In 2008, Hurst told the Herald one of the things he learned from his father was “there is only today, now”.
In 2019, he says, “My time is the time I’m in right now, and my time is ending.”
What is it like, this end of days? Actually, says Hurst, it doesn’t worry him. Because he’s an actor and so is his wife of more than 30 years, Jennifer Ward-Lealand.
“I’m at the fluid edge of society and always have been. I don’t want to sound my own trumpet but Jennifer and I, a lot of actors I know, we’re actually at the good end of it, because actors are like that. That’s why we’re so scary to people. Because we float through all sorts of things.”
Although: “Look how many actors now are being outed for their bad behaviour. ”
Hurst has heard the excuses and here, he says, are a few that don’t work: ”’Well, it was a different time then.’ ‘Not all men are like that.’ Well, sorry, let’s just shut up and change it and move on.”
I’m at the fluid edge of society and always have been.
Michael Hurst