‘It’s been a whirlwind... in a week your whole life flips’
WHEN she auditioned for the film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Lydia Peckham used her creativity and ingenuity.
The 27-year-old was on her own in Nelson when she was asked to send an audition tape to Hollywood. Normally she would ask a colleague to film her, but no-one was around so she bungy-tied the camera to a tree. As the sun dappled among the trees and the snowy peaks of Mount Arthur glistened in the background, Peckham filmed herself acting the role she hoped she might win.
Speaking between film shoots from the new Disney film studios in Sydney, the actor laughs that ‘‘it obviously worked’’.
Since October she has been across the Tasman, filming one of the lead roles in the scifi action film directed by Wes Ball (of The Maze Runner fame). ‘‘It has been a whirlwind . . . You go from one state and then suddenly in a week your whole life flips. It’s so exciting. Who knows what’s in the future?’’
Peckham was raised ‘‘in the middle of nowhere in the islands of Scotland’’, where her parents raised their children with no TV. ‘‘Imagination was a massive part of me growing up and I used to go and create whole stories with my siblings as a child. And so I was always telling stories and putting myself in characters and I just loved playing in that space.’’
She moved to New Zealand aged eight and discovered acting when she was in Year 10 and performed in the Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival. That was that for Peckham, who went through Toi Whakaari.
Among her credits so far are performing as Katerina in Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop and starring in Apple TV+’s Mr Corman. Only Cloud Knows was an NZ-Chinese production, which meant she spent time in China in 2019 for the filming and then was back and forth to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou for the premieres.
‘‘I was playing someone who was aged
from 16 years up to like 35 years old, which meant they had to put on prosthetics to help me age, so I got flown over there to go through this whole procedure of getting a mask of my face and doing tests of the prosthetics.’’
Once her current filming schedule was over, Peckham planned to be home for summer – in a campervan she shares with her partner, on a plot of land they own in Kerikeri. She hopes Kingdom will be a career launching pad and in 2023 plans to venture to Los Angeles and London. ‘‘I’m just trying to plant as many seeds so that I have multiple doors that open in the future. I don’t have anything specific planned for 2023 beyond this role, but I have a good feeling.’’