Newburyport Daily Newspaper
New Zealand actor brings his talents North of Boston
By: Rosemary Ford (staff writer)
Brian Sergent's name and face may not be familiar here in the States, but in his native New Zealand, he's as recognizable as Brad Pit. "There are four million people in New Zealand, and I joke I am on first-name terms with all of them," says Sergent, who's been living in Newburyport this spring. "I am overexposed, I am over-familiar to a lot of people. Here, they're anonymity."
Sergent, who's been in dozens of New Zealand radio plays, theater shows and films including "The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring" is back on movie screens this summer. He's got a role in in "Eagle vs. Shark," an independent film from New Zealand that opens today at AMC Loews in Harvard Square in Boston.
While Sergent has traveled back to New Zealand to promote the new film, he'll soon become a more familiar face North of Boston. He plans to return to the area this fall to become a theatre major at Salem State College.
"I've always been drawn to Massachusetts and New England," said Sergent, who added the idea of an American education was too good to resist.
"It is very, very beautiful here and the landscape is just stunning. New Zealand is also stunning, in a different way, but there is something about around here that is unsurpassed."
Although the 47-year-old Sergent has had considerable acting experience, his education came on the job instead of in the classroom. That's why he's decided to enroll in college now. His hope is to take the education he receives back to his hometown of Naenae (which means sand fly in Maori, the native people of New Zealand) when he is done.
Sergent got his first acting job as a 15-year-old when a teen soap opera began filming at his high school. But after his application to drama school was turned down, he became a civil servant in New Zealand. The government job was short-lived; he left after a few months when he got an apprenticeship at a local theatre in New Zealand. And by age 20, Sergent had his first film role.
Since then, he's been performing on television, and in theatre and films, as well as doing standup comedy.
"In the United States and England, people tend to be one sort of actor or another--in theatre or television or film," Sergent said. "(In New Zealand), we have the luxury of moving through all the different media. Because the industry is so small, you have to. I can't afford to have an exclusive experience. I wouldn't make a living that way."
"Eagle vs. Shark, an oddball romantic comedy along the lines of "Napolean Dynamite," follows the quirky romance between two misfits--Jarrod, a video clerk played by Jermaine Clement, and Lily, played by Loren Horsely.
Jarrod has spent the last 10 years training to pay back the two bullies who tortured him in high school. He goes to a "dress-as-your-favorite-animal" party as a fluffy-headed eagle, where he meets Lilly, another misfit dressed as an anemic shark.
Sergent plays Jonah, Jarrod's distraught father. Jonah is psychosomatically wheel-chair bound after a bout with depression over the death of his oldest son, Gordon (played by director Taika Cohen).
"Eagle vs. Shark" was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance and won the Film Discovery Jury Award at The Comedy Arts Festival.
"It doesn't really sound funny, but it is. I can't really describe how, you have to see the film," said Sergent, who spent time on set conjuring up tears.
While Sergent has been in almost all of director Peters Jackson's fims--including playing a Hobbit with prosthetic ears and feet in "The Lord of the Rings," the majority of his work has been in theatre, which remains his first love. Sergent has also written a few plays.
"There's nothing like a live performance, the immediacy, the danger of being out there and entertaining a crowd of strangers," he said.
He feels he still has a lot to learn--which is the reason he's moving here to attend Salem State.
"I want to learn about theatre production," Sergent said. "The heartland of theatre is the Eastern United States."
'Tis the season: Brian Sergent
5:00AM Friday Dec 22, 2006
Brian Sergent
Brian Sergent
Outrageous Fortune actor
* * *
What's top of your Christmas wish list this year - excluding world peace?
World domination.
As a wee 'un, what was the one present you always wanted but never got? A Star Trek Transporter, as in "Beam me up, Scotty".
Do you still want it?
Unquestionably, yes.
Defining moment of 2006, for you:
Being pushed into a river in West Auckland while we were shooting of Outrageous Fortune, series 2.
Most-overrated thing/person/topic of the year:
Anything to do with Heather Mills.
Album of the year:
Rod Stewart - Still The Same.
Movie/DVD of the year:
Capote.
Person of the year:
My personal manager D.J. Heile.
The most important lesson you learned this year was ...
A torn cartilage is a real pain in the knee!
New Year's resolution for 2007:
Finding personal contentment.
Your prediction for 2007's next big thing ...
Taika Waititi's film, Eagle vs Shark.
One urban reptile said to the other New Zealand Listener by Jane Bowron
New Zealand’s greatest comic actor,
Brian Sergent, is about to take on the character of
the legendary Brian Bell – a hellraiser, possibly a genius, kindly fellow and
terrible old bastard who was “in a class of his own”.
Very suddenly, Brian Sergent materialises in the
departure lounge at Christchurch Airport, looking like something Scotty has just
beamed up. He’s been in Dunedin revivifying his flagging spirits with the
pre-Raphaelite exhibition, but it already seems to have worn off. He’s done with
airports, he says, as he morosely observes the spectacle of families trying to
get back to where they came from three days after Christmas.
“Everybody looks evil,” he mutters and shuffles silently on board flight NZ440 to Wellington. He sits in the wrong seat, but shifts after a girl waves her ticket number at him and whispers loudly to her boyfriend: “Isn’t that that actor guy?”
It is. Sergent is a day off 45, and is very low. He has only recently returned from LA where he spent three nightmarish days hanging round an airport haggling with the promoters of a Lord of the Rings conference who pulled the financial plug – but hadn’t bothered to tell a group of New Zealand actors boarding the plane to LA on the way to the conference in Oregon.
He’s miserable and bellicose, which is good if you’re a method actor because that’s just how he needs to be when he plays Rodney Pump in The Love of Human Kind, a play that opens this week at Wellington’s Circa Theatre.
Sergent wrote it. Longtime friend and colleague Danny Mulheron, who is directing the play, bequeathed Sergent his old computer and in a matter of weeks the actor had bashed off his first play, which is based on the friendship of two Wellington pensioners, Brian Bell and Mark Smith.
During the interview, Sergent and I work out when we first met Bell. Sergent puts his introduction at a couple of years before I managed to secure an interview with Bell, spread over 12 hours and four cafés, for a story about eccentrics. We both agree that it was when the old boy must have been in his sixties, an age Bell would vehemently deny, as he always insisted that he was in his early fifties.
Sergent and I met over 20 years ago when we were both cast in a play produced by Wellington Repertory Theatre. Pasted outside the theatre, there were appalling publicity pictures taken of me in shortie pyjamas , which I’d completely forgotten about till one day when I was round at Mark Smith’s, and Bell asked me if I wanted to see pictures of Olga, the Russian bride he’d once been married to. As Bell was pathologically private about his past relationships, marriages and children, I smelt a rat, but it took me a while to recognise that the girl in the photograph he held out for me to look at was myself. It was a classic Bell gag, with the long, rambling anecdote to set it up and then, kapow, the strange resurfacing of a theatrical relic that left you reeling with its elaborate and slightly creepy calculation.
But that was Bell. If you were going to be his friend, you had to take the good with the bad.
When Sergent first wrote The Love of Human Kind, he hadn’t planned on performing in it. But when the role became increasingly difficult to cast, Frankenstein decided that he’d have to play the special monster he’d created that is now called Rodney Pump.
“He’s a man who’s very bright, wonderful with words, but socially impaired or retarded and finds it difficult to say please and thank you properly,” he says. “His story is difficult to tell because it’s quite emotional and mad, as is his outlook on life, which is pretty cynical and often impaired by alcohol.
“He has a combative outlook. He expects trouble and he finds it from the most innocuous things to genuine hassles. His low irritation level makes him difficult to get close to or be around for any length of time.
“In controlled doses, this self-confessed ergophobe [someone with a powerful aversion to work] is hugely entertaining and he knows all these things about himself, but he’s fighting that as well – fighting his own personality.”
Pump has known Mark Smith (who is based on the real Smith, now deceased) since the 1960s, when Smith was a low-ranking public servant. One of Smith’s lines in the play is: “I was 42 years old on the wages of an office boy.” Running parallel with this humdrum professional existence was an extraordinarily prolific, dramatic and hilarious erotic career.
Smith to Pump from the play: “Every woman I’ve ever met has been two-faced, grasping, treacherous and will stop at nothing because they’ve got this bit of paper with a secret message screwed up and stuck inside their ear and on that piece of paper is a message that says, ‘I hate men.’ That’s why I’ve left it in my will for a man to come along with an aerosol can and write on my coffin lid: ‘I hate women.’”
Sergent vividly remembers an excruciating walk down Lambton Quay with Bell tagging behind a very elegantly dressed woman and blowing raspberry noises. The woman would turn round and Bell would say wickedly, “Don’t they start when you do that?”
“These poor women had done nothing to him, but
the mere fact that they were women meant they’d done something to someone. He
liked to prick the bubble of their gentility by doing things like that.”
To Bell, women were natural dissemblers presenting themselves as frail when they were as tough as old boots. As for lesbians, Bell was obsessed with them. Sergent: “He thought they were a clear and present danger and that the entire Wellington lesbian community knew where he was at all times and would shoot him on sight.”
Gleefully, Bell would tell the story of how he attempted to throw a lesbian through the plate glass of the James Smith department store window, was arrested and taken round the corner in a police car – only to be released immediately, because (so he said) the police were secretly in sympathy with him.
The play is basically about two old blokes and their two younger friends sitting around in a drab flat, getting pissed and abusing the world, women and one another. The notion that it might be of little interest to the mineral-water generation has crossed Sergent’s mind. “But that’s not the point,” he says. “You can reduce any drama down to the basics and say that The Lord of the Rings is just a bunch of elves looking for a ring, or Moby Dick’s about a sea captain who gets his leg bitten off by a whale and can’t forget about it.”
Sergent thought that the image of one man perpetually sitting still (Smith) while watching another man (Pump) of similar age jitterbug manically round the room had comic potential. That they’d been doing this for 40 years of friendship and bitching, as a way of coping with the hard facts about themselves, is the subtext of the play.
“Mark Smith didn’t speak 25 percent as much as Bell, but when he did, it was f---ing priceless. He said Bell had a vocabulary like Niagara Falls. Smith was someone Bell shut up for.”
Although fabulously literate, and a drinking associate of Denis Glover and James K Baxter, Bell had a crippling lack of discipline that stopped him from ever writing a book. But he was among other things a pamphleteer, an essayist and he entertained the electorate in the letters column of the Dominion.
Sergent remembers his first impressions on meeting Bell at a dinner party. Though there was something shabbily genteel about him, and his courtroom barrister’s voice enchanted him, he was completely bowled over by Bell’s repellent body odour. Eventually, Sergent took him home to mother, who wanted desperately to bath him – “His idea of personal hygiene was changing his tie” – and the bonding process was cemented when Sergent and Bell (hired for his huge beer gut) acted in the Gaylene Preston film Marriage, shot entirely on location in Naenae.
A high point in the friendship was a terrific Christmas dinner attended by Bell and Smith, with everyone on their best behaviour. But, as Sergent ominously says, remembering the next occasion, “Bell would let no good deed go unpunished.
“One night in honour of a special occasion I cooked what I considered a f---ing good working man’s tea of bangers and mash and pudding. But unbeknown to me Bell had jacked up an enormous bottle of vodka which he started to kick shit out of as soon as he arrived.
“The bottle level went down amazingly quickly, so I served the tea up and Smith tucked in like a good’un, but Bell put his cigarette out in his, which turned me into a po-faced maiden aunt. Then it was all on.
“Bell’s technique of fighting was to roll up like a hedgehog and barrel into you. His punches weren’t up to much, but he had these very effective little pinching fingers.”
After wrestling the bottle of vodka from him, Sergent and Bell pursued each other round the house till a doorway altercation resulted in the jamming of Bell’s fingers. Taxis were repeatedly called and untaken till Bell finally left. He woke the next morning to find the fingers of one hand swollen up like sausages. Unable to remember how he acquired them, he ruthlessly cross-examined Smith, until Smith rang Sergent, afraid that he was going to crack from Bell “interrogating me like a lawyer” and threatening to press charges.
Another of Bell’s more unlovely qualities was his have-cake-and-eat-it attitude to the police, both living in fear of them and dobbing associates into them when it suited. It was only a matter of time before friends fell out with him forever.
Soirées and outings were what Bell lived for. If he couldn’t get entrance to houses he was banned from for outrageous behaviour, he would attempt hosting in his ghastly studio flat. This invitation was bacterially perilous; he would boast that the pathogens were so bountiful and large that they were in the habit of rising up from the disgusting floor and sauntering across the road. Sergent remembers, “The toilet was unbelievable and he insisted on making a cup of tea by running the hot tap into a mug and waving a teabag through it.”
Sergent's play is a tribute to characters seldom represented in New Zealand literature. He says, “The loner, instead of wandering the country roads, wanders the city streets as if they were in the wilderness and not necessarily in a friendly environment. They haven’t got jobs, homes, families … They’ve got addictions, phobias and it’s not so much their environment but their reaction to it that makes it hostile.
“I can’t think of another instance where these urban reptiles have been represented and certainly the play makes no attempt to put them in a context that the straight world can relate to.”
Bell and Smith were terrible old bastards. But their conversation was fantastic, and they were capable of great acts of sensitivity and kindness.
“Look, this play isn’t political,” says Sergent. “It’s not about championing the dispossessed or painting them as glamorous bohemians. I’ve got two real Wellingtonians here who were extraordinary, and logic dictates there must be a whole lot more of them.
“This play’s really a comedy of manners which tries to re-create the atmosphere that went on in those rooms. It’s primarily a comedy that says have a look at these characters, look at the beauty that can be found in ugly things because they’re in a class of their own.”
The saddest thing for Sergent was that – true to form – he and Bell weren’t on speaking terms before Bell died.
“I’d been found wanting, not staunch enough or willing to up sticks and go on adventures at the drop of a hat. I had other people depending on me and I needed a quieter life than Bell could provide.”
Smith died first, then Bell a couple of months later. There’s a line Smith says in the play that actually describes how Bell discovered his old mate had departed this world: “One day you’ll come round here and there’ll be a sign on the door that says, ‘No more meals on wheels, this man is deceased. All enquires to the Totalisator Agency Board.’”
Grieving for Smith, and with moves afoot to make him into a mental health patient, Bell died alone in his flat in Newtown, the suburb he’d once described as one giant psychiatric ward. He wasn’t found for 10 days.
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The Love of Humankind is based on the play of the same name by Eastbourne actor and playwright Brian Sergent.
Sergent, a star of television series Outrageous Fortune and one of New Zealand's best comic actors, will star as the eccentric Rodney Pump, a character based on his friend Bell.
The film will be directed by Danny Mulheron, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Sergent and directed the play at Circa Theatre in 2004.
The Love of Humankind, largely shot in the Wellington suburbs of Berhampore and Newtown where Bell lived, will be produced by Mulheron and cartoonist and writer Tom Scott's Direct Hit productions, which made television comedy Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby. It is being financed by overseas investors.
Bell, 71 when he died in 2000, was a larger-than-life figure in Wellington for more than 50 years. From the 1950s till the 1970s he documented the city's bohemian and literary circles, taking hundreds of photographs, and his friends included James K Baxter and Frank Sargeson. Though a talented writer, especially of letters to newspapers, he was best known as a hard-drinking pub and coffee shop dweller, who was funny, acerbic or rude, depending on his mood.
"This is kind of a record time from play to film because a lot of people get disheartened because it's usually a long struggle. I'm very excited to be doing it," said Sergent, who also stars in another Wellington feature comedy, Eagle vs Shark.
"Brian was the last of a breed who wrote hilarious letters to The Evening Post and The Dominion. They were fantastically good pieces of writing. They were alive with character."
Sergent, who won the Chapman Tripp playwright of the year award for his play, said the film meant the story could be broader than what was shown on stage. "Brian Bell was a person of the Wellington streets and we can go there. We can show Berhampore, Newtown, all the places in Wellington. It shows its gritty underbelly."
Veteran Wellington actor Ken Blackburn will reprise his stage role as drinking partner Mark Smith. Other parts are still to be cast.
Sergent
starred in the low-budget Wellington-set feature The
Shirt in 2000 and played Ted Sandyman in
The Fellowship of the Ring. The Love of Humankind
will be Mulheron's first feature as a director after
a long career in theatre, television and film,
including co-writing Peter Jackson's Meet the
Feebles.
