The wheel of TV fortune has turned full circle for actress Siobhan Marshall. More than 10 years after she first appeared on Shortland Street, the Outrageous Fortune star is back on the soap in a new role as a high-flying doctor.
Clearly it has proven difficult to take Marshall out of the west.
Marshall made a major impact as Pascalle West, the eldest daughter of the iconic westie family in the Kiwi drama Outrageous Fortune.
And now she is back in west Auckland at Shortland Street’s base in Henderson.
Marshall’s 2004 appearance on Shortland Street was brief but she is back to play Dr Ava Eriksson, Ferndale’s latest addition and a doctor of appearance medicine.
Not only does Ava sport a shorter, more mature hairstyle than Pascalle, she is also different in other ways to Marshall’s ditsy Outrageous Fortune character.
“She’s quite different,” Marshall says. “She’s really confident, she’s really smart and she’s very ambitious… She’s definitely not Pascalle so that’s good.”
Although she may have book smarts, Marshall says her character is not always the most clued up in social situations.
“She’s a little bit confusing because she is really smart but in a lot of ways she misses the point, Marshall says. “I’ve played other characters, like Pascalle.
“She wasn’t book smart but she could pick up what was going on quite well. Whereas this one socially doesn’t, which is kind of funny and quite fun…
“Sometimes she just misses things that are happening around her. She is charming. Well I hope she is, she’s supposed to be. I’m trying to be. So she’s quite good in certain social situations when she’s putting on an act but she misses a few social cues.”
It wasn’t hard for Siobhan to step into the shoes of a doctor of appearance medicine, which includes everything from facials to botox and tummy tucks. Marshall is, in fact, an ambassador for a beauty spa which specialises in skin treatments.
“Funnily enough I am the ambassador for About Face,” Marshall says. “It’s quite funny because I get involved a little bit with them and I find it all quite interesting. It does work well, except with their brand it’s all kind of quite natural stuff. There are no injectables or anything like that, so it’s a little bit different. I had to ring them up… They were like ‘Just so long as you say you don’t do any of that stuff’. No, they’re fine with it. They’re really lovely.”
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Landing a role on Shortland Street for the second time was a surprise for Marshall who didn’t think she’d be back on the drama.
“I didn’t see that one coming,” she says. “I think because I’d been on Shortland Street before I didn’t even really entertain the idea that I could come back, even though it was 11 years ago that I was on it the first time. So yeah, when I got the audition I was like ‘Why not'”
Marshall’s first TV job was playing Chris Warner’s (Michael Galvin) nanny-turned-love-interest, also named Siobhan.
This time around she is working closely with Michael again and says the meeting of their characters was a bit surreal.
“I was like ‘In this scene, because we were meeting for the first time, why don’t we look at each other like there’s a bit of deja vu, like I’ve met you before'” Marshall laughs. “But no, we didn’t do that.”
It is uncertain how long Ava will be around on the drama, with Marshall and her partner, Auckland Daze actor Millen Baird, looking at a move overseas at some stage.
“I think we’re going to head over to the States,” Marshall says. “I’ve always wanted to do it. It’s just fun to have a bit of a different environment and do a few different things. I’m just trying to get my green card so I might be here for a bit longer. We’ll see how it goes.”
Shortland Street
TV 2
Weeknights, 7pm.
– TV Guide
