From conflicted gangster Tony Soprano to chemist-turned-criminal Walter White to Peaky Blinder Tommy Shelby, the modern golden age of television has been all about the (mainly male) antihero. Aotearoa has answered back.
Our antihero arrives via the gripping six-part series, After the Party, who’s main character, Penny, is played by Robyn Malcolm – who also co-created (along with Dianne Taylor) the show described by the Spinoff as “the best TV drama we’ve ever made”.
It’s not just Kiwi media who have been salivating. The Sydney Morning Herald has labelled After the Party as “what might be the best New Zealand drama ever produced” while the Guardian called Robyn’s lead turn “one of the greatest performances in any TV show in years”.
Of course, the actor is no stranger to major roles (Shortland Street, Outrageous Fortune, Far North), but After the Party hits different. Over a coffee in Kingsland, I begin by asking her if the cast and crew knew they that they were creating something special during filming.
“We had this first public airing of it in Wellington where we played the first two episodes and I’ve never felt so sick with fear,” recalls the actor. “I’d been right through the edit, I’d seen it all, and we kind of knew that it didn’t suck! By the end, it was clear that it was going well, but you still never quite trust it.”
It was at the Séries Mania Film Festival in France, where audiences “went mental”, that Robyn really realised that they’d really nailed it.
“The French are brutal – they throw stuff at you at Cannes, for instance, if they don’t like what you’re doing! But they gave us a standing ovation.”
They also gave Robyn the best actress award – making her the first Kiwi to bring that one back home.
“A Parisian journalist who writes for a cultural magazine told me, in a brilliantly thick French accent, that I had changed the face for women in Europe. I said, ‘Really?’ She said, ‘Yes, really,’ and was very euphoric about it.”
Then, as if to bring herself back down to earth, Robyn knowingly smiles in that way someone does before they’re about to let you in on a secret.
“Antipodean women are quite different to European ones, though. Another time I was at a party in Paris and got chatting to a stylish young French woman who was impeccably groomed, in a little black dress, while I was wearing boots, jeans, and a t-shirt. Towards the end of our conversation, she leaned in and looked at me quite curiously and said, ‘I have one just one question. How do you manage to be so lovely and so gross all at once?’!”
Back to After the Party, gross is an accusation that could certainly be levelled at some of Penny’s actions in a gritty drama that unashamedly embraces the ambiguity that tangles its core, teasing audiences with the truth until almost the very end. Penny thinks she saw her husband do something unforgivable, but she can’t be certain, and is willing to rip apart her own world, and sometimes the lives of others, to discover what really went down. But even when Penny has quite clearly crossed a line – or two, or three – you can’t help but want to reach through the screen and give her a great big hug.
“I like people who admit that they’re flawed,” says Robyn. “I think everyone in some way or other is a kind of beautiful disaster. Everybody’s just trying to get on.”
Refusing to sugarcoat characters’ flaws is a big part of why audiences have so related to them, believes Robyn.
“We don’t make an effort to make anyone a particular hero.
We created a dilemma and then just tried to put real and complicated people in the middle of it, all with emotional stakes in the game.
“I feel like there’s a lot of television made with characters you can’t identify with because they’re too out of reach. In America, they’re either superheroes or they’re just extremely good at their job.”
Penny’s job is as a teacher. I ask Robyn what she was like at school. “A geek!” comes the reply. I was expecting ‘rebel’, I tell her. “No, that came later,” she says. “I was a creative geek. I played the piano. I played the cello. I sang classical music. I painted. I drew. I was a bookworm. I wasn’t interested in boys at all. And then when I was about 15 or 16, I became politicised. And that turned everything on its head. I got angry. I started to fall in love with drama more as a kind of a hobby, but it was the music that got me into that. And the rebel, I guess, came out of that. I left home and I left town quite soon after that when I was about 17.”
That town was Ashburton, whose “mostly right wing” residents took umbrage to Robyn’s – and her parents’ – anti-1981 Springbok Tour stance: the actor recalls getting pelted with dirt while on a march.
“My dad back then was the associate principal of the secondary school and parents threatened to withdraw their kids when he signed a petition against the tour in the local paper. I remember being so incensed. I also became a vegetarian around that time and became a supporter of the Animal Liberation Front and Amnesty International.”
Robyn continues to use her platform in support of worthwhile causes, serving as an ambassador for Greenpeace, recently attending the March for Nature, and speaking up in support of the Palestinians.
“I had quite a lot of rage energy, so getting political was quite a good outlet for that,” she says. “As was drama which enabled me to sort of funnel that energy. And drama is an inherently political act, I think.”
Now Robyn has two boys of her own, aged 18 and 20. She believes that they will both end up in the industry in some way, and is thankful that they have realistic expectations having “seen it close up”. “The primary experience of being an actor is rejection,” she laments. “We only ever see actors when they’re in a job. So, actors become extraordinary at dealing with that and I also think it’s why actors are a bit nuts! My boys have seen how much work goes into an audition, and don’t have stars in their eyes at all. I think they may end up behind the camera.
“I’ll be acting until I’m 80, hopefully longer!”, and, just like parenthood, age, she feels, enhances actors’ chops.
They grew up on film sets and they love film sets. Film sets are wonderful places to be.”
I ask Robyn if, looking back, there was anything she would have done differently. She admits to sometimes feeling that she feels she stayed on Shortland Street for too long (she did 600 episodes). Did she just get too comfortable? “Yeah, I just got lazy, and I liked the money. But I look back now and realise that everything that happened after that was good. You only ever regret stuff if you’re not happy and I’m really happy with where I’m at.”
Once Outrageous Fortune came to an end, many advised Robyn to leave the country. “I was told that I had to get out, that no one will thank me for staying. Even friends were telling me that my kids would adapt and cope – which of course they would, because they wouldn’t have had a choice. I might have had more exciting opportunities, and the chance to earn more money, but in the end, my gut just said ‘no’. And now, my boys are the most normal kids. They’re solid. They’re solid in themselves.”
Motherhood, she describes as the “world of unconditional love and uncontrollable fear”. “I think it taught me to not take what I do too seriously. Like with any art, you can be deeply passionate about your work, but if you white-knuckle it, if you need it too much, then you start to destroy it. It’s like the sporting term about catching a ball with soft hands. Working in the creative world, you do have to have soft hands. And becoming a mother taught me that, to just relax a little bit more.
“You parent and parent and parent and you love, and you tolerate, and you mess up and you try to do everything you can for them. Then 18 or so years later they walk away. And that’s how it should be, but it’s just this terrible, wonderful moment.”
Robyn reveals that she has no plans to ever retire (“I’ll be acting until I’m 80, hopefully longer!”), and, just like parenthood, age, she feels, enhances actors’ chops.
“The minute you get into characters who’ve had some life, you’ve got really interesting stories because they’ve got a whole bunch of history that they can play, with actors who can draw on their own experiences. Judi Dench in Notes on a Scandal, no young actor could ever have done what she did, same with Anthony Hopkins in The Father. There are some real trailblazers out there. Frances McDormand is one that we all look to because she hasn’t messed with her face. She is who she is. And she plays these really wonderful, complex characters.”
Later this year Robyn will star alongside Melanie Lynskey in a film abut the Pike River mine tragedy. The pair play Sonya Rockhouse, who lost her son, and Anna Osbourne, who lost her husband, in the 2010 explosion, and who have since helped spearhead the fight for justice for all those involved.
“We were with Anna and Sonya a lot, it was brilliant to have them around, they’re amazing women with a great sense of humour,” says Robyn. “But we were shooting in Greymouth, which is where it happened, and you can feel the tragedy in that world. And it’s tough, really tough. And I think, because a bit like when I did Far North and also played a real character, there’s a different edge to it because you want to do right by those real lives, you know. And then it’s less about, ‘Am I performing well?’ or ‘Am I doing a good job as an actor?’, it’s about ‘Am I taking care of this real-life person in this story?’
And that’s a different kind of pressure.”
Read the Verve review of After the Party, and watch it on TVNZ+
