Dunedin actor Simon O’Connor plays convicted murderer Alf Benning in a new TV movie. He talks to about bringing the Wellington suburban strangler back to life for
James Croot How To Murder Your Wife.
How did you hear about the project and what attracted you to the part of Alf? My agent encouraged me to audition. By all accounts, Alf was a disarmingly friendly, almost nondescript sort of a man, and a pleasant and helpful neighbour. I liked the idea of a man like that telling his own (not necessarily reliable) version of events. The mix of forensic fact and whimsical fiction that writer John Banas plays with in the script was apparent. That was enormously appealing. What did you know about the original events? I knew very little. I think I was living in Wellington around the time of the murder and the trial, so I must have heard about it. But it doesn’t seem to have stuck with me at all. How did you prepare for the role? Early on, I tried to find out as much as I could about Alf Benning and the actual events of the murder. There was very little to go on really. I spent time trying to recollect in detail people I’d known who were of that vintage and who, from memory, might have been a bit ‘‘Alf-like’’ in various ways. That at least helped to refresh my impressions of the social setting of the era. Much closer to the start of the shoot, I met the real Detective Sergeant ‘‘Biggles’’ Everitt, who arrested Alf. Talking with him was a revelation. There are quirks of Alf’s manner and behaviour that were quite odd, almost counterintuitive from an acting point of view, and it would have been impossible to get close to much of that stuff without the help of Mark Everitt and a few others who had actually known Alf and observed him at the time. What was the toughest challenge of the role? Working with Klaus, who plays Shep in the film, was sometimes a challenge. Klaus is lovely but there were moments when we found ourselves pulling in different directions creatively. Dogs are like that I suppose. How easy was it to leave the character behind at the end of a day’s shoot? So much of Alf was actually quite guileless and naively genial that it was sometimes a pleasure to face the world from his perspective. The darker moments could sit quite heavily by the end of a day though. There is one scene – a short, violent sequence involving a cleaver and some flesh – that was especially gruelling. They served pork for lunch on the set that day and I’ve never found pork so unappealing. What extra responsibility did you feel playing a real person? Playing a ‘‘real’’ person is hard. If Alf Benning is remembered at all it will be, for the most-part, only for having murdered his wife. On the other hand, his next-door neighbour at the time recalled Alf having been very helpful and compassionate when their dog got his leash tangled and nearly choked. And, by all accounts even some of the police had a kind of soft spot for ‘‘wee’’ Alf. All I could do was play the Alf in the script and hope to bring some sense of humanity to the character. The story is a black comedy –