4VF News – Daily News Channel

In the backstage toilets of a community theatre in south-west London, a group of amateur actors is taking time out from rehearsals to photograph poo – their own poo.

To make their messy mission easier, they’ve been issued with clear plastic lunchboxes and are taking the photos through the lids. It occurs to me that this would be a very bad day to take the wrong lunchbox home by mistake.

In due course they gather around a man with huge biceps stretching at the sleeves of his eggshell blue polo shirt. He has blown-up copies of all the poo portraits, and is showing them to the TV cameras and the group.

“Who did this one,” demands Dr Christian, holding up a photo that looks like a kilo of Maltesers that’s been dropped on to concrete from a second-storey window. A part-time thespian raises a sheepish hand. “Well, you need to drink a lot more water, and lay off the takeaways after the pub.”

Making reference to a gruesome document known as the Bristol Stool Chart, the good doctor then comments on the shape, colour and consistency of everyone else’s sample in turn, suggesting appropriate lifestyle and dietary changes. In living rooms all around the world, home viewers are in the unusual position of contemplating what secrets might be revealed by their own poo.

Welcome to Embarrassing Bodies, a hit British TV series that looks at private health issues in an extremely public way, with no orifice left unexposed to the cameras and a good deal of extremely graphic content, including extensive surgery segments.

It’s a show where anything scabby, seeping or severely inflamed gets top billing, yet it’s unexpectedly compelling viewing, inspiring a curious mix of anxiety and empathy as we are reminded of the thousand natural shocks to which flesh is heir.

Still, you can’t help but wonder – does this series represent some sort of ultra-intrusive nadir for reality television Are the featured guests so desperate to appear on television that they’ll do anything, even poo in a lunchbox or reveal that their bum is covered in boils

Actually, no. Embarrassing Bodies is notable for its absence of fame-seeking airheads. For the most part, what we have here are people driven demented by intractable ailments, seeking free help from the show’s specialists.

If that means having high-definition footage of their haemorrhoids beamed into living rooms around the globe, it’s a price they’re prepared to pay.

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Dr Dawn. Dr Pixie. Dr Christian. The three host GPs sound like representatives of opposing New Age and religious standpoints. And they clearly love their work. Dr Dawn blathers to camera while undergoing a mammogram. Dr Christian nips into a porn-filled cubicle with a plastic jar to give a sperm sample. Dr Pixie, meanwhile, is fond of dusty 1950s euphemisms, talking about “problems down below” or “issues with the old waterworks” in a soft Scottish brogue as HD cameras zoom in on someone’s unspeakably private affliction.

We meet a woman who undresses each night with the lights out because she doesn’t want her boyfriend to see her inverted nipple, yet here she is, displaying said nipple under bright studio lighting to the entire world on mainstream TV.

A rugby team assembles in the shower room to debunk myths regarding penis size; I am delighted to discover that the average penis is really rather puny. Dodgy visual puns abound: Dr Christian takes men with low sperm counts to a paintball centre to “see if they’re firing blanks”.

Blood. Guts. Poo. Scrotal cysts, prolapsed rectums, entire skifields of dandruff. People who’ve headed off to Thailand for cut-price liposuction and returned with misshapen abdomens as well as the usual sunburn. For the squeamish, the show is a nightmare. You don’t want to be eating your dinner while someone has their veruccas prodded with an ice-block stick.

But more importantly, this show saves lives. Embarrassing Bodies helps reduce misinformation and stigma surrounding many conditions, with GPs, specialists and on-line forums all reporting a significant spike in people seeking advice and treatment after specific illnesses have been covered

Varicose veins, impotence, acne, excess hair. Alopecia, irritable bowel syndrome, obesity, incontinence. The show makes the point that 70 per cent of us will experience at least one such illness at some point in our lives, and it’s better to seek professional help than suffer in silence.

Launched in 2007, Embarrassing Bodies draws more than four million weekly viewers in the UK alone, with extensive international screenings on top of that. Success has spawned multiple spin-offs, focusing on the many and varied humiliations associated with Fat Bodies, Kids’ Bodies and Teenage Bodies. There’s even a Skype-assisted interactive version called Embarrassing Bodies: Live from the Clinic.

Series Three of the original show currently screens on BBC Knowledge on Tuesdays at 8.30pm. And an Aussie version has just launched at 10pm the same night on TV2, providing the hosts an opportunity to employ groanworthy “problems down under” puns for assorted trouser-based afflictions.

It can only be a matter of time before there’s a local version. Embarrassing Kiwi Bodies, anyone If it comes to pass, I will be watching it, and I’d encourage you to do the same.

This is a show that will almost certainly ruin your dinner, but it’s one of the few that might also save your life.

– Sunday Star Times

Being a shambolic 20-something isn’t just a guy thing. Jeremy Olds talks to the stars of a critically acclaimed female ‘buddy-comedy’ newly arrived on New Zealand screens.

It’s tough work, being a total loser. For Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, it has taken years of rejection, persistence, and the involvement of a comedy-megastar to reach the point where they can make a living as complete failures.

Now, playing characters of the same name, they happily fill their days cleaning a fetishist’s apartment in their knickers, buying weed from a child, and gobbling shellfish despite being violently allergic.
Jacobson and Glazer are the creators, writers and stars of Broad City, one of television’s most popular and irreverent new comedies. The on-screen Abbi and Ilana are two shambolic, 20-something, pot-smoking best friends living in New York. “We’re Just 2 Jewesses Tryin’ To Make A Buck,” Ilana types in the season premiere.

Peter Jackson’s long-held desire to update The Dam Busters looks closer to becoming a reality, with the director indicating that a Kiwi-angled version of the story could be his next movie.

“We don’t have a next movie nailed down, but certainly The Dam Busters is one of them [under consideration],” Jackson told Hollywood Deadline.

“There is only a limited span I can abide people driving me nuts asking when I’m going to do that project. So I’ll have to do it.”

Jackson said the mission to destroy three dams in Germany during World War II had strong New Zealand links; several of the airmen involved were Kiwis, including the mission’s last living pilot, 95-year-old Gisborne-born Les Munro.

“It’s one of the truly great true stories of the Second World War, a wonderful, wonderful story,” Jackson said.

“There’s a notable New Zealand connection. It has been 20 years since Heavenly Creatures [Sir Peter’s film which starred Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey], where we told a New Zealand story. I’d qualify The Dam Busters as a New Zealand story.”

Jackson said his long-mooted version of The Dam Busters would not be “a remake” of the 1955 black and white epic “as much as a retelling of the original raid”.

The Academy Award-winner has been linked to the new version for almost a decade and had commissioned the construction of replica Lancaster bombers for a test film shoot.

But the project has never formally been given the green light due to his commitments to The Hobbit trilogy.

Jackson was also considering a film version of As Nature Made Him, the story of Canadian man David Reimer who was raised a female after a botched circumcision when he was aged just 7 months.

At the recommendation of New Zealand psychologist and sexologist John Money, who died in 2006, Reimer’s parents approved gender realignment surgery on their son and renamed him Brenda. But as a 15-year-old Reimer transitioned to living as a male. He died suddenly in 2005, aged just 38.

Jackson said a film adaptation of As Nature Made Him also classified as a “New Zealand story . . . the doctor who was the cause of that family’s misery was a New Zealander . . . Dr John Money,” he said.

“Whatever we end up doing in whatever order, we are looking forward to making Kiwi stories.”

The final part of The Hobbit, The Battle of the Five Armies is scheduled for release in December. The movie’s first trailer premiered at the San Diego Comic Con expo late last month.

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– Sunday Star Times

Chris Martin has no doubt had a radical change in diet after reportedly ditching Gwyneth Paltrow for Jennifer Lawrence.

The Daily Mail reported the couple have been spending time together since the end of June, after the Hunger Games star broke up with X-Men co-star Nicholas Hoult.

Justin Bieber has reportedly paid authorities for abandoning his pet monkey in Germany.

The 20-year-old Canadian singer lost his gifted pet primate Mally after entering the country without filling out the proper paperwork in March 2013.

German officials seized the animal and Bieber never returned to retrieve Mally.

Seventeen months later, German authorities now say the pop star has paid the US$10,700 (NZ$12,600) he owed as a result, according to the Associated Press.

A spokesperson for the German Federal Nature Conservation Agency told the outlet the fines were from the monkey’s import and the cost of care at an animal shelter.

Bieber was given the unusual pet for his 19th birthday by music producer Jamal ‘Mally Mal’ Rashid.

The primate was seized by customs officials in Germany on March 28 2013 and placed in quarantine.

Reports last year suggested Bieber had previously been given an extension to complete the paperwork to get his pet back, after his management initially expressed an interest in retrieving the monkey. But it appeared the All Around The World singer has now bowed to pressure from animal welfare experts who have implored the star to “do the decent thing” and release Mally to officials.

“A baby monkey was never going to be suited to be on a world tour even if he is travelling by private jet,” the Munich clinic boss Karl Heinz Joachim told Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper at the time. “He should be out in the wild climbing trees and learning from other monkeys if he isn’t to have serious psychological problems later in life.”

Capuchin monkeys normally spend at least one year bonding with their mother, but Mally was given to Bieber at just nine to ten weeks old. It had been reported the monkey was crying out to find other members of its family.

“We have to discuss now the way forward with customs officials and other responsible departments,” Joachim added.

Mally now lives at a zoo in northern Germany, according to AP.

Attorney Ellen Frederichs told Celebuzz late last year Bieber would be forced to pay the fines if he ever wanted to step foot in Germany in the future.

“If Mr. Bieber will not settle his costs, the payment might have to be enforced when he will enter Germany again,” she said.

Hands up who doesn’t remember where and when they were smacked over the head by the visual and emotional assault that is Once Were Warriors.

The 1994 drama about the dysfunctional Heke family exposed a dark vein of domestic violence, rape, suicide and alcoholism and propelled New Zealand cinema on to the world stage.

Now a new documentary marking the seminal movie’s 20th anniversary tells the story behind its evolution and reunites its cast. It also calls Warriors the single most important film to come out of New Zealand. That’s debatable, but what’s not disputed is that this dose of hard urban realism broke all the rules, and box office records, and changed the lives of all those who made it great.

The documentary, Once Were Warriors: Where are they now, by cast member-turned-filmmaker Julian Arahanga, reveals the real- life struggles and strains that lay behind the explosive on-screen performances.

Take Rena Owen’s fury in the pivotal scene where a battered Beth Heke growls at husband Jake: “You want something to eat Learn how to cook!” Exhausted and emotionally flatlining after an entire day of filming violent scenes, followed by a 4.30am start, Owen dissolved into tears when director Lee Tamahori then asked her to reshoot that highly-charged exchange.

“When you see that scene – that anger, all of that is pure, raw, very real emotion,” Owen says.

Compare the photos of the Heke family actors then and now and you get some sense of the physical transformation required to turn slight Temuera Morrison, then known primarily as Dr Ropata in Shortland Street, into a seething brute who would raise the ire of audiences around the world.

But Morrison reveals that the emotional transformation was just as radical – finding anger where there was none and shutting out the chorus of derision from those who said the good doctor could never be a convincing Jake the Muss. Even Owen admits she doubted her co-star could pull it off.

Cliff Curtis tells Arahanga he desperately wanted to turn down the part of Uncle Bully, who rapes his best mate Jake’s daughter Gracie.

Some of the Heke family have since slipped quietly out of the spotlight. Joseph Kairau, who played cheeky young Huata Heke, has now moved on to greener pastures, dairy farming in Waikato. Rachael Morris Tautau, who played Polly Heke, happily slid back into life in Tolaga Bay, where she now runs a fish and chip shop.

But for many of the cast and crew, Warriors was a springboard to international exposure, if not stardom. Morrison, Owen and Tamahori all landed jobs in Hollywood. Curtis, who stars in the latest critically acclaimed Kiwi production The Dark Horse, was too flat out even to return to New Zealand for the cast reunion.

For Arahanga, too, the experience was life-changing. Unlike the younger actors, playing gangster Nig Heke wasn’t the 22-year-old Arahanga’s acting debut.

He first met his father, film producer Larry Parr, at age 11 and that year appeared in Parr’s short film The Makutu on Mrs Jones. Coming from rural Raetihi, Arahanga was instantly attracted to this world of alternative- thinking, alternative-dressing types who seemed to play for a living. What he struggled with was becoming the centre of attention at Raetihi Primary School when the film came out.

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Consequently, his film involvement shifted behind the scenes and when he left school he went to work for key grip Harry Harrison. Warriors changed all that.

“Suddenly people said, ‘You’re an actor’, whereas I thought I was a film technician.”

One of Arahanga’s over-riding memories of shooting Warriors was the process of crafting Nig, from trying out different types of moko and costume to create the New Age gangster look, to the three to four hours he would spend getting into character. Once they had settled on a moko design the image was sent to the United States to be made into tattoo transfers. But there weren’t enough transfers to just slap another one on for every scene.

“Sometimes I had to wear the moko home and try to sleep on one side of my face. I remember going into a dairy to get some bread and milk. Because moko weren’t very common back then, people in the shop were staring at me like, ‘What’s wrong with you’ ”

Losing the moko was an easy way to climb out of Nig’s character, Arahanga recalls.

“They would scrub your face with isopropyl alcohol for half an hour to get it off. When you lose half your skin off your face, that’s a good cleansing.”

Arahanga’s performance as Nig Heke eventually led to a role in blockbuster The Matrix, via the most surreal of days while he was “bumming around” in New York.

“I got a call from a woman from a casting agency calling from Sydney. She said the Wachowski brothers want to meet you for this movie called The Matrix. I didn’t know who the Wachowski brothers were, I didn’t know what The Matrix was. Then she said we are going to have a car come to your house in three hours from now. I’m like, ‘What’. Three hours later I was in a limousine driving to JFK, boarding an aeroplane and flying to LA, where I got picked up and taken to this Beverly Hills hotel. In this huge suite there’s this reading table. The room is all dark and there’s a lamp and a big A4 envelope. I open it up and there’s a script that says The Matrix.

“So I had to start reading the script and my head is just going, ‘What the, what kind of a day am I having’ ”

The next morning Arahanga met the Wachowski brothers. They talked about Warriors and the All Blacks and asked if he could do an American accent. He lied and said “Yes”. Two weeks later he was on set in Australia.

“To this day, the fact I’ve been part of something that’s been so big does make people take you a little bit more seriously. In the States, in Europe, wherever you go, there’s still a respect for that film.”

The 43-year-old father of five has since moved back behind the camera, founding Wellington production company Awa Films. He’s also continued down the emotionally raw road, producing acclaimed television series Songs from the Inside, taking Kiwi musicians into prisons. So he was an obvious choice when Warriors producer Robin Scholes conceived the idea of a 20-year anniversary documentary.

Like most 20-something men trying to figure out where they fit, Nig Heke was too caught up in his own world to notice much of what went on around him.

So Arahanga was curious to find out more about the making of the scenes that did not involve him. He also wondered if his fellow cast members felt that same sense of having been involved in something truly special. As he travelled the world tracking them down that question was quickly answered.

“There’s still that genuine connection. There’s a bond that’s been forged, it’s not just filmmaking. When you have those good memories and you know you’ve been into battle together and done good things together, that bond stays with you for life.”

It’s been a stressful week for Mamaengaroa Kerr- Bell, but it’s not her return to New Zealand screens after almost two decades that’s been uppermost in her mind.

At 7am on Tuesday she drove to hospital in Cairns to take her youngest son, 2-year-old Te Kauri, for day surgery to remove the tonsils and adenoids that sometimes stop him breathing at night.

During our conversation there’s a muffled clamour in the background: “Muuuuuuum, what have you done with my ninja toys”. Kerr-Bell laughs the giggle of that teenager we all came to know: “I sneak outside in the dark and they still find me.”

Twenty years on from playing the Heke family’s troubled teen Grace, 36-year-old Kerr-Bell is now a dedicated mother of four in Queensland. To Ngarimu, Kaya, Teina-Jayde and Te Kauri she’s just ‘mum’.

Related: What became of Grace Heke

But very occasionally, when a random stranger stops her in the street to give her a hug, they get an inkling of the fact mum was once part of something big. “Mum, were you famous” they ask. “Sort of, once,” Kerr-Bell replies.

The Whangarei 15-year-old never set out to be famous. She didn’t even want to audition. If it hadn’t been for casting director Don Selwyn’s cheeky challenge as she was playing basketball outside the audition hall, some other teen would have ended up as Gracie.

“He said ‘Do you want to audition’ ‘Oh, no, no.’ He goes ‘Why not’ I thought I don’t know why not. ‘I guess I’ll just come and audition then’.”

Kerr-Bell read the scene where a stoned Gracie and Toot chat in a wrecked car, asking “Why’s everything so black” Within weeks, her school certificate year was history and within months she was living with the three other non-Auckland-based child actors. They were supposed to do school work after filming, but Kerr-Bell was too exhausted. No wonder, given the film’s gruelling subject matter.

Perhaps surprisingly, though, it’s not the rape scene with Uncle Bully that stands out in her memory from the six weeks of shooting. It was so short, and Cliff Curtis worked so hard to make her feel comfortable, that it was eclipsed by having to climb into a coffin for the tangi scene and the trauma of the suicide scene.

“That was all just so real. Rena’s performance gave me goosebumps, hearing her scream. It made me want to cry. Actually I think I did cry that night, because it was such an emotional night.”

After filming, Kerr-Bell returned to school, telling her friends it was “just a budget New Zealand movie”. It wasn’t until the first screening that reality was slammed home.

“I didn’t completely understand what we were making until I saw it cut all together. Then it hit me and I was like ‘Oh, my god, what have we made’ I was really scared about the reaction from the public. I’m 15-years-old and I’ve just made a movie about Maori, my people, beating their women and raping their children. I was so young I didn’t understand that these were universal subjects. I didn’t realise that until a month or so after the film when we had people really accolading what we had done and how we had brought all these subjects out into the light.”

In 20 years she’s only once had a negative reaction, from a relative. Mostly people want to hug her in empathy for Gracie’s plight.

After the movie, Kerr-Bell tried to go back to school, but her friends had moved on. She did a handful of acting projects, including an acclaimed performance in Wellington play Flat Out Brown and a two-month national school tour of The Debate, by Warriors screenwriter Riwia Brown. She even appeared in Shortland Street, in 1997, playing Tania Rikihana, a love interest for ambulance officer Rangi.

But if Kerr-Bell had ever seriously considered acting as a career, that ended when she had Ngarimu 18 years ago, at the age of 18. Although she did act in another play after Ngarimu’s birth, her priorities quickly changed. Nonetheless she was determined not to forget the world of possibilities Warriors had opened her eyes to.

“I grew up in a small town where there were single mums all over the place. My peers were having babies. They’d be at home on the welfare and the dads wouldn’t be any better off. It just really made me see that that didn’t have to be the way my life had to go. It made me believe I could do anything if I just put my mind to it and put the hard work in.”

Even as she had three more children, and moved to Perth to follow her then husband’s job, Kerr-Bell “didn’t just sit there and let my brain waste away”. She studied travel, tried screen makeup in a bid to stay in the film industry and she now works in real estate.

When she split from her husband about three years ago she moved to Cairns, where her mother lives. She’s unlikely to return to acting while her children are still at home, but she’s not ruling out a comeback in her 50s.

Faced again with Don Selwyn’s casting challenge, would she still accept

“Hell, yeah, in a heartbeat. I didn’t realise how life-changing that one small act was going to be. I’m in a really good place in my life right now.

“Everything, that whole chain of events that brought me here, now, wouldn’t have happened.”

– The Dominion Post

When Danielle Cormack wrapped filming on the last season of her prison drama, she jumped on her motorbike and rode. It was 14 hours straight, from Melbourne to Sydney – it probably could have been less but she took her time, letting the road slide past the wheels of her Kawasaki V-star.

In her Sydney apartment she unpacked, re-packed, then boarded a flight for New Zealand with her 4-year-old son, Te Ahi Ka.

Here she is now in a room at Auckland’s SkyCity hotel, all kick-ass leather pants and boots and curly red hair; Ahi is lying upside down on the bed watching cartoons.

“I’ve been in prison for the last 10 months, I feel shattered,” she says, flopping down on a couch before getting up again almost immediately. “Do you want a drink There’s a minibar . . . but I don’t drink. I mean I do drink, but I don’t drink-drink. How about an instant coffee Should we go crazy”

Coffee would be great, I say. She brings it over. “What did you do with Danielle Cormack’ ‘Oh we sat around and drank instant coffee, it was wild’,” she jokes.

Drinks aside, it kind of is. If this is Cormack tired, the thought of her at the top of her game is enough to leave anyone exhausted.

But if she’s running on adrenaline, it’s understandable. Wentworth, the Australian television drama in which she plays the leading role, is rating through the roof. A remake of the iconic 1980s series Prisoner, it is set in a women’s prison and stars Cormack as Bea Smith, a former hairdresser who has been jailed for the attempted murder of her abusive husband.

Premiering on Foxtel in 2013, the first episode was the most-watched non sports programme ever on Australian pay-per-view television. It won most outstanding drama at this year’s Astra awards, with Cormack picking up a Logie nomination for most outstanding actor. In New Zealand, the show is doing so well TV2 is pulling the second season into an earlier 8.30pm timeslot for its premiere on August 25.

For Cormack, 43, it’s the culmination of a few years of extremely hard work – recognition that has come from playing a series of tough female roles while juggling being a mum to Ahi and her older son Ethan, 18.

Let’s rewind for a moment. Cormack is already well-known to most Kiwis, making her debut on New Zealand screens as a purple-eyeshadowed teenager in Gloss in 1987. We next knew her as nurse Alison Raynor in Shortland Street before film roles in Topless Women talk about their Lives and quirky farm fairytale The Price of Milk.

Cormack first moved to Australia in 2007, working in the Melbourne Theatre Company before heading back to New Zealand to star in The Cult. The short-lived series lasted just long enough for her to pick up Best Actress at the 2010 NZ Film and TV Awards, before heading back across the ditch.

“I guess I just felt like I wanted a change of scene. I’d been working here for a long time, I wanted to live in a different city and be around different people,” Cormack says.

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“I felt like I wanted a bit of a shake up really, I wanted to displace myself and was ready for a new adventure, but I didn’t want to go too far away and get lost in a saturated market. That gamble has paid off, I think.”

In Australia, her star began to rise with her role as vicious real-life crime lord Kate Leigh in Underbelly: Razor in 2011. That in turn led to her being cast in Rake as Scarlett, the foil to Richard Roxburgh’s self-destructive barrister Cleaver Greene.

When she heard about Wentworth, she wanted in.

“Along with every other actress in Australia I was very keen to read the scripts and see if they were interested in me auditioning and they were, thanks I think in part to my role in Underbelly, and the producers had seen some of my work in Rake as well.”

The role of Bea has not been easy. A victim of domestic violence, she has to learn how to survive in the toxic atmosphere of a women’s prison. Season one ends with the murder of her daughter, Debbie, orchestrated by one of the other criminals.

For research, Cormack visited inmates at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in Victoria. They told of the power struggles, the manipulation and the dynamics on the inside.

Up to 80 per cent of female prisoners are on medication, Cormack says, a “sad indictment,” on why they might be in there. Once inside, they’re just trying to cope. “I think that’s what this show explores, what personal lines do you cross to survive.”

Part of the reason Cormack bought a motorbike, which she is working on customising in her spare time, was to get the horrors she was re-creating every day out of her head.

“Wentworth is an incredibly violent show, Bea’s journey was incredibly stressful and distressing, and so I just needed to have 10 minutes at the end of every day just to defrag,” she says.

“In the weekends I needed to divorce myself from the scripts, and I find it very hard just to sit down and do nothing. I love taking things apart and rebuilding them – sort of like construction. I like the architecture of things, like fashion, I used to like sewing my own clothes and building things, I’ve done renovations on my house. So I’ve found a great joy in riding motorcycles.”

And alcohol is no longer an option. Why not “I had to stop drinking, it wasn’t suiting my life anymore,” is all she’ll say.

Despite the difficulties, she has loved playing Bea. She’s one of a trio of clever, wily women Cormack has bought to life, alongside Kate in Underbelly and Scarlett in Rake.

Cormack is all too aware of the stereotyped role of women in TV drama, and is happy she is in a place where she doesn’t have to play the token housewife or the love interest.

“It’s amazing to play characters who are kind of heroes, and you don’t see strong women on TV a lot who become heroes, who are standing up and fighting for their beliefs. I like being able to play women who are independent and really strong and not there to necessitate a male character.”

How has she found ageing in an industry where so much currency is placed on looks

“I feel like at this point, any relationship to vanity on screen has gone out the window because I have such great characters to play I don’t have to rely on how they look, and the external machinations of these characters are so much more important to me,” Cormack says.

She finds that she doesn’t worry about her looks as much as she once did. “I am easing up on myself, not being as hard on myself as I used to be. You have to be, we’re in this world of HD [high definition] and that is not kind to anyone. I’m surprised there’s not actors and actresses out there running around committing hari kari because it’s mortifying seeing yourself up there.”

But television drama is a better place for females than at the beginning of her career, she says. Shows like Homeland, The Good Wife, The Bridge, and Orange is the new Black (yes, they are constantly being compared to the Netflix prison drama, though Cormack says they are completely different shows) all have strong, imperfect female characters.

“The industry is becoming more balanced now, there are more places and stories being told about women by women and I think there is still so much to come. It’s a source that’s just starting to be tapped, thankfully.”

In Wentworth she’s been behind the camera helping to direct the last two episodes of season three. During breaks in filming last year she took a directorial course at Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art, and hopes to do more.

“It was so much fun, and I felt like it was the right time for me to explore that side of my profession. I realised over the years I’ve worked you just observe so much, and I thought I’d be really scared and feel out of my depth but I didn’t,” she says.

“I don’t necessarily see it as transitioning from acting, it’s more like exploring another creative annex of my work. I mean I like taking photographs, I like wardrobe, I like telling stories . . . I think when you work in a creative context it shouldn’t be limited to just one field.”

With that, Ahi’s had enough. “Mu…um.” he says, jumping up on the bed. There’s a brief interlude while Cormack orders him some fish and chips, and straightens his Spiderman top.

It is Cormack’s second entrance into motherhood, with her first son Ethan now 18. Ahi is her son with Boy actor Pana Hema-Taylor, 24, a relationship with an age gap big enough to get the women’s mags knocking back in 2010.

The pair are no longer together, and Cormack has a new partner. “No I’m not single, I’m in a really fantastic relationship right now . . . ahhhh . . . yeah,” she says, trailing off.

“I’m surprised [the breakup] is not something that has been reported on before.”

By giving interviews to women’s magazines while she was with Hema-Taylor, Cormack found she had opened the floodgates. She now tries to keep her personal life that way.

“I guess for me there were some pretty challenging times and you know, I ended up selling a story or two and it was a really interesting time for me to do that. It was unlike me, it was uncharacteristic so then the byproduct of that is that people become really intrigued in your personal life and you can’t have one, and the choices that I made were heavily scrutinised.”

Cormack still finds it difficult to walk the line between being open and guarded, and even after more than two decades in the industry, she doesn’t think she will ever be immune to a spiteful story.

“Never. There’s always something that comes and blindsides you. It’s hard not to take it personally. Yes of course you have to adopt a certain amount of . . . savvy What is it, savviness Savvy To deal with media and the interest in your life and your work, but not so much that it robs you of your authenticity.”

But social media has opened up a whole new channel between actors and their audience, one that allows them to communicate directly. She grabs her phone, where on Instagram a fan has created a picture that splices an image of Lorde saying “You can call me Queen Bea,” and an image of a stern-looking Cormack as Bea Smith saying: “No.”

Cormack is cracking up. “I just love it, I love it.”

For young performers, like Lorde, social media has also given them a voice and allowed them to construct their own image, she says.

“I’m just thankful that there are these young heroines that are actually going against the grain, it’s so refreshing. There was a section of time there that it seemed like for women to get any attention they had to objectify themselves, and the media was all for that.

“As a parent, I mean I’ve got two sons but if I had two daughters I would be absolutely plastering their walls with young women like that. ‘Sorry, take down the Paris Hilton poster and whack up Lorde there please.’ People like Natalie Portman, she’s got a degree, she’s never been at the centre of any scandal or have to propagate any behaviour to get attention.”

Is she a feminist

“Yes. It’s a really interesting time to be a feminist and to allow yourself to be able to be feminine as well. The idea of being a feminist is still really blurred out there. You don’t have to be female to be a feminist, you don’t have to be a man hater or gay to be a feminist.

“It’s just about taking those strong ideas that our fore-sisters had all those years ago and contemporising them, rounding off some of those edges. I’m very aware of females being reduced, there is a reductive culture out there and it’s calling people on that.”

Ahi’s finished his fish and chips, or rather, all the tomato sauce. It’s almost bedtime. He’ll get to see two sets of grandparents in Auckland before they jet back across the ditch.

For now, Cormack says Australia is home.

“I feel permanently over there now, I’d love to come back and live in New Zealand but there’s just no work here for me. I don’t know why that is, maybe after 20 years of seeing me on TV people are just sick of me,” she laughs.

“Australia for me has been supportive of where I want to go and what I’m interested in. I love coming back here, but at the moment I would prefer to invest my time over there work-wise because there’s more remuneration.”

Cormack, Mum, Bea, Kate, Scarlett, Nurse Alison Raynor. She’s been through a lot of incantations over the years, and Cormack does feel like she’s changed.

“I should hope so. I feel like every experience that I’ve had . . . shifting home, selling up here, having another child, travelling . . . I hope that I’m continally adapting and learning and adjusting to whatever is happening presently, that is important to me.

“It’s a necessity to survival for me, just part of growing up.”

The deaths this week of Lauren Bacall and Robin Williams weigh heavily on all those who love film. Some stars are irreplaceable.

It’s also an appropriate occasion to revisit a question that has troubled Hollywood these last few years: As much as we’ll miss Williams and Bacall, do movie stars even matter anymore

It has become commonplace to assert that we live in the post-star era, in which, as