Brokenwood’s Fern ‘I’VE FALLEN IN LOVE ALL OVER AGAIN!’
Her heartbreaking return to Aotearoa has had a happy ending
After three years crisscrossing the globe, returning regularly to New Zealand to shoot her lead role in The Brokenwood Mysteries,
actress Fern Sutherland thought she had finally found a place to call home as she and her partner Jarrod Kilner started putting down roots in Toronto.
“It’s such a vibrant, multicultural city, so close to New York, and we had a great apartment in Little Italy,” the Taranaki-born star tells Woman’s Day wistfully. “The temperatures get down to -30 degrees, so you’re constantly at war with the elements, but I love winter and really like the man-versus-wild aspect. We were finally starting to feel settled and the plan was to get permanent residency…”
Then along came 2020. That February, as borders began to close, panicked Brokenwood
producers called Fern, 33, telling her to hightail it back to Aotearoa so she wouldn’t miss filming the internationally popular murder-mystery series that June.
“It seemed crazy, but there was so much uncertainty,” she recalls. “We knew New Zealand would be the best place to weather the storm, but giving up on this life that we’d put so much energy into setting up was really sad.”
After a tearful debate about what to do, Fern and landscape designer Jarrod, 38, had 48 hours to “pack up our house, clean the apartment, negotiate with our landlord, cancel our bank account and utilities, and give away everything we couldn’t fit in our bags”, before getting on a flight to Auckland via Vancouver.
They’d planned to quarantine in New Plymouth, but while they were up in the air, MIQ hotels became mandatory and their domestic flights were cancelled. However, with the rules still new and seemingly flexible, Fern and Jarrod were permitted to make the fivehour drive south, as long as they didn’t stop along the way.
So Brokenwood producer Tim Balme dropped off his car, filled with petrol and snacks, and the pair travelled the eerily silent streets, pausing only to pee by the side of the road in Te Kuiti, to Tim’s Taranaki apartment, which was stocked with two weeks’ worth of groceries.
“We only had our winter clothes with us, so we were sweating away in our underwear in the tail-end of a great summer, but we were so grateful,” says Fern. “Jacinda Ardern was becoming a figurehead for how to handle COVID and New Zealand was 100% the best place to be.
“It was definitely a time of re-evaluation. We’d given up our lives here and severed ties that had to be rebuilt, but
I tried not to feel sorry for myself because I had work coming up, which was obscene and unusual in that time, especially in the creative industries.”
After their two-week quarantine, Fern and Jarrod spent the rest of lockdown at her parents’ farm in nearby Lepperton, before finding an inner-city apartment in Auckland. “If you squint, you can kind of pretend you’re living in a bustling metropolis,” laughs Fern.
Usually shot in the depths of winter, the seventh series of Brokenwood was filmed the following Kiwi summer due to lockdown delays, with Fern sweltering under the sun in jeans and woollen blazers. Another key difference for this season is the fact it will screen on TVNZ 1 – Sundays at 8.30pm – rather than its former home on Prime, guaranteeing a greater local audience.
“I’m really excited about the move because it’ll give the show some fresh life and, this many seasons down the line, any point of difference is useful,” says Fern, who says she goes largely incognito in
Aotearoa, but was regularly recognised by “passionate, enthusiastic” Brokenwood fans in Canada.
Interestingly, Fern hasn’t always been so enamoured of the show herself, admitting that she came on board thinking they were making a “dark, twisted, Broadchurch-style Scandi-noir” and was initially disillusioned to find it was more of a “light-hearted, characterdriven” black comedy.
“It was an earnest, egotistical thing, but I’ve since learnt there’s a huge cultural value in this type of show,” the actress confesses. “It really hit home for me recently, when I was getting so many messages from people in Italy and Eastern Europe who had COVID, thanking me for the show, which had got them through such a tricky, terrifying and lonely experience.
“I was gobsmacked by that. I never made this show thinking I was making a difference in the world or that I was improving people’s lives. I’m so grateful to be part of something that’s helping people get through shitty situations. It’s actually made me fall in love with the show all over again.”
‘If you squint, you can pretend it’s a bustling city!’