You’re in the Far North now, Dr Ropata
The Star Wars universe is the gift that keeps giving to Temuera Morrison, but the character he plays in the Far North TV series is well and truly down-to-earth. Adam Dudding reports.
It’s almost over before it begins. The publicist and I sit in a Zoom meeting, waiting for Temuera Morrison to dial in from wherever he is right now. It would have been face-to-face, except Morrison had dashed off to the UK for a comic and film convention where people queue for autographs from the man who played Boba Fett in a galaxy far far away. So it’s a video call from the UK – or perhaps he’s in Los Angeles? No one seems sure. Wherever he is, he’s definitely not on this Zoom call. We make plans to reconvene.
Then a day later, there he is. In what looks like an open-plan kitchen, wearing a beige hoodie. The camera angle is very low and the orientation portrait, so I’m guessing a phone propped up on a table – but the lighting is good: bright sunlight casting shadows amid the stubble on his jaw, and glinting off the top of his shaven head. I ask where he is.
“I’ve been overseas and now I’m in a place called Maketu. North of Whakatāne Oh right, so not London, clearly. He explains that he’s just recently back, via LA. When he’s in New Zealand he stays in Devonport in Auckland, and in Rotorua, but right now he’s taking a bit of a break at the bach by the beach.
“Getting time with my baby girl.”
That’s Waipunaarangi, Morrison’s daughter with Ashlee Howden-Sadlier, named after one of the stars of Matariki. (He has two older children from relationships with singer Kim Willoughby and journalist Peata Melbourne).
He swings the camera to show his daughter, sitting by his side eating grapes.
“The girl likes it here at the beach bach. It’s easier down here. It’s nice and quiet.”
So the 62-year-old globetrotter is temporarily at rest: “First day off for the last 10 years.”
I can’t quite tell if he’s kidding: this is the guy who in 2013 starred in a reality TV series whose premise was that his Hollywood career had gone sideways, and he better hustle to stop it grinding to a complete halt.
No, says Morrison, he really is keeping busy. He gets good roles in New Zealand, like the one he’s promoting right now – the TV crime caper Far North. He gets work in Australia: “I do little movies over there if I'm a bit tired of New Zealand.”
But also, pretty consistently, he’s still getting work in Hollywood. Yes, he knows he’s missed roles because he is, frankly, pretty hopeless at learning new accents – “When the agent calls to say ‘Oh, you need an accent’, I just say ‘Call Cliff Curtis’” – but filmmakers seem increasingly unfazed by Kiwi accents, so he’s still doing OK.
His 2002 role in the Star Wars prequel Attack of the Clones, as the bounty hunter Jango Fett, has been the gift that keeps giving. Jango was the genetic template for the clones of the movie’s title, meaning that ever since, Morrison has slotted into roles across the sprawling universe of Star Wars movies, computer games and TV spinoffs. His character’s name and backstory might change, but the cloned face (and Morrison’s unalteringly Kiwi accent) remains the same. The biggest job of late was 2021’s TV series The Book of Boba Fett, in which Morrison had the title role (Boba is not just Jango’s clone but also his son, but if you’re into Star Wars you’ll already know that).
Plus the thing about Star Wars is that even when you’re not actually making something new, there’s still the fans.
“Book of Boba was good for me in terms of conventions and things like that,” says Morrison. “It kind of surprises me. Very, very popular.”
The people who come along to comic-cons “have a passion like nothing else. They line up for three hours for your autograph, but then I found out they don’t really want your autograph. They just want a moment. Some of them go buy something else so they can get my autograph again. They want to say hello. I love them. They're very cool people.”
Sometimes they even want to talk about his other work.
“Things like Barb Wire with Pamela Anderson. Speed 2. Six Days, Seven Nights. Sometimes they bring in photos of Jake the Muss they want signed. One fella turned up with a VHS of Once Were Warriors not so long ago. I was blown away.”
Under normal circumstances, Morrison might have told me about some of his more current Hollywood outings. Such as his forthcoming reappearance as Jason Momoa’s father in the Aquaman sequel. Or another project starring Momoa – Apple TV+’s historical drama Chief of War, set in 18th century Hawaii and partly shot in New Zealand. Or Morrison’s blink-andyou’ll-miss-it cameo in The Flash, which came out in June.
But … today he won’t. That’s because he’s a member of the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), which in mid-July went on strike in solidarity with screenwriters who downed tools back in May. And promoting shows produced on SAG-AFTRA sets is against the rules.
So let’s hear about his new local project, Far North.
Far North is a six-part TV series, “mostly based” on a real-life drug bust in Northland in 2016. It follows a small team of crims who drive up from Auckland to collect a half-billiondollar delivery of methamphetamine from a Chinese trawler waiting off the coast at Ninety Mile Beach, but make a sequence of crucial blunders. Meanwhile the trawler crew hovering off-shore are running out of patience – and water.
It’s a rollicking failed-heist comedy-drama, and some of the dumber-and-dumber plot-points are so ridiculous I presumed they’d been added purely for laughs – but when I checked news cuttings, it turns out the more absurd the detail the more likely it was to be true.
Morrison plays an ageing Ahipara diesel mechanic, Ed, who helps launch the bad guys’ boat at Shipwreck Bay, but starts to realise the out-of-towners are not just idiots – they’re also up to something. Robyn Malcolm plays Ed’s wife, and aqua aerobics instructor called Heather.
Morrison (Te Arawa, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Rārua) is a son of Rotorua, from the talented Morrison whānau that includes the late Sir Howard and the Te Reo Māori academic and broadcaster Scotty. He says he’s not had much connection to the Far North before, but early last year he’d been to the tangi in Ahipara of his “very close friend” Pete Smith, the actor. So when filming began, the ice was already broken with some of the locals.
“They said, ‘Oh, I heard you were up at Pete’s tangi.’ If you do things like that the word goes around.”
In the scenes between Morrison and Malcolm, there’s a wonderfully relaxed chemistry, which stands to reason, given they’ve been friends since the mid-90s, when Morrison’s Dr Hone Ropata and Malcolm’s nurse Ellen Crozier overlapped as core cast on Shortland Street.
“I just remember what a powerful force Robyn was when she came on to Shortland Street,” says Morrison. “She had a lot of mana to her acting […] Robyn and I have a very great friendship from way back.”
When I give Malcolm a bell, she recalls she and Morrison never did many scenes together on the medical soap: their storylines didn’t intersect much and he was also away quite a lot, preparing for some Lee Tamahori-directed domestic drama called Once Were Warriors.
She does remember though, that Morrison had the coolest car in the cast – “a sage-green 1980s Mercedes Benz”.
More pertinently, she and Morrison lived in the same street in Devonport, “so we probably spent more time as neighbours rather than actors”.
So yes, that onscreen vibe in Far North is real. But the pair were also able to draw directly from the example of Leo and Yvette Lloyd – the real-life Ahipara locals who Ed and Heather are based on.
The four of them met up before filming started, and “that warmth in the marriage on screen was what we witnessed”, says Malcolm.
Oh – and the production also used the Lloyds’ actual house, tractor, ute, boat and dogs as locations, props and canine extras for the actual shoot.
“We basically used their life,” says Malcolm, “which was so wonderful.”
Between scenes, the pair just hung out with their dogs a lot. “It was a very
good-natured shoot – because that’s who Tem is. He’s not full of what some might call the wankeries of being an actor. But the work he does is precise and real and in this case full of heart. He was gorgeous to work with.”
She says despite his CV, Morrison is weirdly humble about his acting chops.
On the first day of Far North she remembers him saying to her, “Oh you’re a real one.”
“And I went, ‘What do you mean, a real one?’
“‘A real actor.’
“And I was like, ‘Jesus. Are you kidding me? You’re Jake the Muss – it doesn’t get much more real than that bro.’”
She remembers well the 1994 opening night of Once Were Warriors, when a bunch of Shortland Street actors went along to support Morrison.
“I remember all of us were just absolutely floored by what he did. And then you go oh, this is a real actor.”
There’s an interview Morrison gave in 1986, long before Shortland Street even, where he talked about being advised by actress Ilona Rodgers to wave his hands around less, because it’s distracting. When I remind him, it sparks a reverie.
“I was doing a show in Wellington and the producers kind of knew I couldn't act so they sent me to Ilona. I relished the opportunity, because my good looks would only get me so far.”
He’s collected other bits of advice along the way - from filmmaker Don Selwyn, from Warriors co-star Rena Owen, from Harrison Ford and Marlon Brando.
Ford, on the set of Six Days, Seven
Nights (1998) told him he always liked to
give the director a number of “versions”.
“That was his word. Don’t do the same take the same way the whole time. Try something new. Try a different version. Leave it up to the editor. That one stayed with me.”
Morrison met Brando on the set of The Island of Dr Moreau (1996) where Morrison played a half-human half-dog genetic experiment and Brando played the bad doctor.
“Crazy experience. But Marlon also gave me tips. He said, ‘Never anticipate, my boy. Never anticipate!’”
Morrison was so nervous working with Brando that “I was always jumping ahead of everything, so he's going ‘don't anticipate’. That was a good one.”
He looks thoughtful.
“Yeah I forgot I’d worked with Brando even. Man that brings back memories.”
After Once Were Warriors opened doors for him, “I only wanted to go to Hollywood and do one movie just to say, well, I went to Hollywood.
“And I can say that still. I went to Hollywood, I gave it a go. But even now, they're still ringing. So I don't even know why they're doing that.”
But then again, maybe he does know why.
There’s something he noticed when working alongside Malcolm on Far North she in her late 50s, him in his early 60s.
“It takes some time for you to actually get good at what you’re doing. Robyn and I really wanted to do a good job, and I think that comes with maturity.
“You actually get better at what you're doing. And I feel that – that I'm actually getting a bit better.”
Watch: Far North, Mondays at 8:30pm on Three and ThreeNow