Playing Teina Pora
Actor’s bond with the wronged prisoner
As he walked into Auckland’s Mt Eden Prison, ready to step into the shoes of wrongly convicted inmate Teina Pora, fledgling actor Richard Te Are could feel his heart pounding against his ribcage.
Just a week earlier, he’d met Teina, who has become inextricably linked with the brutal 1992 rape and murder of Susan Burdett even though he’d never set eyes on her. “Just do your best, bro,” Teina, now 43, told Richard as the actor prepared to portray him.
Soon after, in the dank jail, the walls closed in around Richard, 28, and he sensed that for these scenes at least, he wouldn’t need to try very hard to act out the anguish of being locked up for a crime that he didn’t commit.
“Being inside the prison brought on some very visceral feelings,” Richard tells Woman’s
Day. “There are echoes of the past everywhere in there. I was relieved to be able to walk away. I can only imagine what it felt like for Teina to be locked up like that for 20 years.”
Teina was just 17 when he falsely confessed to being present during the attack on Susan in her Papatoetoe home. In the end, private investigator Tim McKinnel spent five years proving that Teina had not committed the heinous crime.
The reason for Teina’s false confession was that he suffers from foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, caused by his mother drinking while pregnant. The damage to his brain made him suggestible and eager to tell police what he thought they wanted to hear.
In April 2014, his conviction was quashed by the Privy Council and he was later awarded $3.5 million in compensation. The dad-of-one has kept a low profile since walking free. “I never gave up hope,” he said after watching the telemovie of his story, “but I did think, ‘S***, how did I make it?’”
Up until recently, Hastingsborn Richard had never even heard of Teina. He’d grown up playing the guitar with his uncles and spent much of his childhood under the wing of his grandmother Babe, who
was “the rock of everything I’ve done”.
He’d enjoyed drama classes at Hastings Boys’ High, but after leaving school at 18, he spent years doing labouring jobs – everything from fruit picking to box making – although even then, his inner thespian insisted on coming out to play.
“I’ve always been a massive storyteller, acting things out and switching into characters,” Richard recalls. “My mates were always going, ‘Bro, you should do something with it.’”
By 25, he’d been a deep-sea fisherman for three years and it was out in the rolling waves of the Tasman Sea that Richard decided to apply for drama school Toi Whakaari. In the final year of his degree, he was asked to audition for the role of Teina. “I didn’t know anything about the story,” he says. “I did some research and thought, ‘This is pretty powerful.’ When they rang to tell me I had the part, I had no words.”
Four weeks later, cameras started rolling on the TVNZ 1 feature InDarkPlaces. It was in the first week of shooting that Richard met Teina.
The actor recalls, “It was a small affair – just an hour. I put a tikanga [traditional Maori] structure in place and we met through song, through whaikorero [a speech of welcome], then closed again with song. We were able to just stand there and go, ‘These are our differences. I’m not you, bro. I can’t ever experience it quite like you, but I can be a vessel to be able to share your story.’”
The pair bonded over a passion for guitar. “Teina’s a great guitarist,” Richard tells. “He’s got a distinct flavour. It’s
I can’t ever experience it quite like you, but I can be a vessel to share story’ your
soulful. We jammed together.”
The movie’s producers soon arranged for them to meet again in a private recording studio, where they played for two hours, cutting a track that features at the end of the film.
While in jail, Teina converted to Christianity. He credits this as the reason he’s been able to drop any grudges, saying, “I don’t hold anything against anybody and that’s the best way to be in life.”
Of his hope for the movie, airing on July 22, Teina tells, “People will come to know what really happened. I don’t ever want another person to go through the same thing that I went through.”
Richard, who has since won roles in two more films, adds, “I do hope it will bring more awareness that our system has these flaws.”
Sadly, Richard’s grandmother died before she could see him on screen.
He tells, “She didn’t quite understand what Toi Whakaari was all about, but she was always supportive. She’d say, ‘If it feels right in your heart, then it must be right.’ I know she’d be happy for me.”