Gareth Reeves - breaking out of the bit parts

Actor Gareth Reeves plays Ryan in TV drama series The Cult. Photo / Martin Sykes

It's fitting to choose a spot on Kingsland's cafe strip to reflect on Gareth Reeve's big year. After a decade of acting, he says he can now afford to eat posh noodles from the Thai place just a few doors along.

Reeves played everything from a heavily disguised clay soldier, a dead elf, and a ghost to a slime-smothered Wilberforce before he landed the role of Ryan Lewis in TV2's much-publicised thriller, The Cult.

And last year he was also cast, unmasked, as the lead in two New Zealand films, A Song of Good and I'm Not Harry Jensen.

Now with The Cult's filming over, Reeves has grown out Ryan's clean-cut, white-panted image and is sporting fresh stubble for his two new gigs: a global warming disaster flick called Ice and a thriller called Tracker, set in 1903.

He says he is the kind of actor who has slogged his guts out to get here.

His father was an artist, but took up a job as a prison warden on a sex offenders' wing before raising the family. Reeves grew up in the Rolleston Prison complex.

"We just grew up doing school athletics, playing in hay bales and hanging out in prison gardens," he says.

Reeves attended Kaiapoi High School, which he didn't enjoy much, but did enjoy cadets, rugby, cricket and even being a born-again Christian (the latter motivated by a girl who was in the youth group).

After eventually leaving the church - because he found its answers did not satisfy his inquisitive mind - he discovered the stage.

As a cocky 17-year-old he fudged his age to get into Wellington's prestigious drama school, Toi Whakaari. His first gig out of drama school put him in his place - a bottom-rung battle scene extra on The Lord of the Rings. Reeves recalls his introduction to the industry during the filming of the Battle of Helm's Deep.

"I would get up at 5pm, catch a bus from Wellington train station to the quarry in Lower Hutt. Pray I was an elf so I'd have the girls fussing over my hair and ears rather than four guys trying to force me into a wet rubber Uruk-Hai outfit. Have breakfast at 6pm and spend all night fighting monsters, falling over, getting killed. Home at sunrise. Sleep the day through, dreaming of monsters. Repeat. Ugh."

On the first day the director asked the elves for a volunteer and Reeves was chosen. "I was so excited - the big movie-making machine in full swing. I was sat down on a rock, given a rug, a coffee and left there for about an hour wondering what my film debut would entail. Later, a Weta dude came over and stuck some arrows into me and informed me I was a background elf corpse."

Most of Reeves' ensuing acting career has been spent on the stage doing anything that came his way. He watched and learned from older actors like Jennifer Ludlam, David McPhail, Bruce Phillips and Katherine McDowell. Then he realised that while he was still scratching to afford two-minute noodles, his drama school friends who had moved to Auckland seemed to have cars that worked and could buy new jeans.

"I thought, hang on what's going on? But then figured out that just doing ads, voice-overs and TV work brought in money."

Reeves' first television series was The Insider's Guide to Love in 2005. The show didn't earn him bucketloads but he did meet his girlfriend of four years, co-star Serena Cotton, on set.

Since then he has appeared on Legend of the Seeker, Go Girls and in Underbelly, in which he played Kiwi Douglas Wilson who was brutally murdered.

Soon after that role Reeves hit a rough spot when his father, who had been his greatest supporter and critic, died of cancer two years ago.

Then Reeves found himself playing a character who had to break the news of his father's terminal illness in the Auckland Theatre Company's play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He says he will stay away from the stage for a while after that experience.

What he would really love to do is another series of The Cult. He had a blast while filming the show alongside a cast of A-list actors this year.

One day he hopes to land a leading role in a big 35mm film - and not be covered in prosthetics as he is as "Wilberforce Drone Number Two" in the Jonathan King adaptation of Maurice Gee's Under the Mountain.

If you can't pick him beneath the gunge, then watch out for I'm Not Harry Jensen, which, after its festival screenings, has secured a cinematic release next year.

And then? An agent is busy scouting roles for him in the US, but Reeves says his heart is set on making great New Zealand films that get noticed - not having a cameo in Everybody Loves Raymond.

He is ambitious but realistic: "I'm not a big guy with a square jaw."

Who: Gareth Reeves
What: The Cult
When and where: Thursdays, 8.30pm