What’s a guy from Te Awamutu doing battling giant Nazi robot spiders and flying saucers 50,000 years in the future
For air force pilot-turned-actor Jak Wyld, it was just another day on the job.
Wyld stars in The 25th Reich, in which he plays one of a team of American GIs sent to the Australian outback in World War II who end up in the distant future.
The film pays homage to the science fiction B-movies of the 1950s, 60s and 70s and is more akin to the works of genre pioneers Ray Harryhausen and George Pal than the blockbusters of Michael Bay or James Cameron.
Without the budget for massive publicity and promotion, The 25th Reich is getting a limited release in New Zealand. It opens in Auckland’s Academy Cinemas tomorrow for a short season, although Wyld is hoping it will also be distributed a little closer to his old hometown. It is also likely the film will be released on DVD within the next few months.
Now based in Sydney, Wyld was born in Britain and moved to Te Awamutu with his family when he was 13. He attended Te Awamutu College before joining the New Zealand Air Force in 1988.
“Originally I wanted to be a pilot, which I did end up doing in 2000, but I realised I needed to find that one thing that made me happy,” he said.
“So I left and began chasing acting roles.”
His love for acting stemmed from stage roles he took on while a student at Te Awamutu College.
In The 25th Reich he plays Corporal Haywood Updike, a soldier from the deep south of the United States and “a powder keg of neuroses, paranoia and prejudice with a very short fuse”.
“I loved playing Updike. It was a little daunting at first, but after a few conversations with the director, Stephen Amis, we honed in on what he was about, then it was a lot of fun.
“We shot in several really remote spots; scorpions under rocks, freezing cold at night, 40 degrees during the day. That aspect of the shoot was very challenging.”
It was also a challenge for the actors to react to attacks by the creatures which were only later added to the film by the special effects department.
Wyld’s career is now starting to take off. His first speaking role was on the New Zealand television series Street Legal and he later had a small role on the mini series Mary Bryant, in 2004, which involved sailing around Palm Beach for a week on The Bounty, the full size sailing ship replica built for the movie Mutiny on the Bounty.
He also appeared in and co-produced the black comedy Ad Nauseam, which won best foreign feature at the LA Indie Festival earlier this year, and he is also working on an animated superhero television series.
Wyld, who rates Clint Eastwood and Karl Urban among his cinema role models,said his dream role would be in a film noir movie set in the 1950s, “playing a hard-boiled detective”.
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