Jodie Rimmer plays a woman in search of her lost punk-rock youth in the new solo show, Nicola Cheeseman is Back. Photo / Dean Purcell
As she prepares for her first one-woman show, Jodie Rimmer talks to Joanna Wane about why it’s time for women to start acting their age.
In the end, it was radio DJ Athena Angelou’s superior bicep power that left Jodie Rimmer undone. But by the time the (then) 45-year-old actor was bumped from Celebrity Treasure Island on day 12, after losing a challenge to the much younger Angelou, she’d made her point. Nobody puts Jodie in a corner.
“The people I hang out with know my value, but they just looked right through me,” she says, of a buff 2019 line-up that included rower Eric Murray and boxer Shane Cameron. “And I didn’t like that at all.”
After knocking out Matty McLean – who went on to win the Fans v Faves edition last year – nailing a memory game and outwitting Murray in a heated leadership challenge, she was finally eliminated to finish around the middle of the pack.
As she headed home from the remote location in Fiji’s Mamanuca Islands, it wasn’t just her two young sons Rimmer was desperate to see. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God. I need a steak and a gin and tonic, ASAP! So, yeah, it was a real hoot.”
Looking back now, five years on, she doesn’t regret the experience. Two of her teammates, musician Ladi6 and Bachelorette Lily McManus, have become good friends. But it was a sharp reminder, she says, of how middle-aged women are seen – or not seen at all. Only former rugby league star Gary “The Wiz” Freeman had more years on the clock than she did.
“It was really tough, living with these men who were very different from me. I was a lot fitter then than I am now. I didn’t have a thyroid problem or an autoimmune disease, as I do now. But they thought I’d be completely useless based on what I looked like.”
That’s all fire in the belly for Rimmer, whose latest project skewers the idea that women tumbling towards menopause become obsolete. It’s a subject close to her heart. Last month, she turned 50 on day three of rehearsals for her first solo show, Nicola Cheeseman is Back, which premieres in Auckland on June 19.
Plans to celebrate her birthday with an 80s dance party are on ice until after the play wraps. Right now, she has 12,000 words to learn before opening night and a dozen or so different characters to flesh out with accents and backstories of their own.
Both Ginette McDonald, who did the one-woman show My Brilliant Divorce at Wellington’s Downstage Theatre in 2009, and Acushla-Tara Kupe, who starred in the Auckland production of Prima Facie last year, have shared invaluable support and advice. With a solo gig like this one, exhilaration and terror co-exist, and sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.
A finalist in last year’s Adam NZ Play Award for new, unproduced work, Nicola Cheeseman is Back is a kind of second-coming-of-age comedy, in the way of Shirley Valentine. The script wasn’t written specifically for Rimmer, but it might have been, the way she pours herself into it.
Her father’s retro caravan, parked out back of her house, has been converted into a space where she runs lines. At a final read-through the week before the production went into rehearsal, a small group including playwright Kathryn Burnett and director Paul Gittins gathered in her Mt Albert living room. Tucked into a bean bag on the floor, Rimmer took a few deep breaths to settle in and then didn’t stop talking for the next 85 minutes.
One by one, the loose pages fell at her feet as she immersed herself in the roll call of characters, from Nicola Cheeseman’s naive 12-year-old daughter to a needy ex-husband who can’t keep up with his much younger girlfriend’s sexual demands and her frail mother-in-law. Like all good comedies, there are piercing moments where you’ll find yourself holding back tears - Rimmer still cries when she reads certain parts of the script.
Radiating a kind of manic energy at the heart of the play, Cheeseman is fierce, funny and so infuriating at times you want to shake some sense into her. Mostly, though, you just want to give her a hug.
The story is a familiar one in its broad trajectory, if not in some of the more colourful details. In her 20s, Nicola Cheeseman was cool. She and her band, the Cherry Slits (possibly the best band name ever), were “belligerent, nouveau-punk goddesses” with big dreams, ready to take the US by storm.
Now in her early 50s, living in the suburbs with two kids, she’s looking back on her life and wondering how she somehow lost herself along the way.
Her boss, a young PR entrepreneur, has “Authenticity is the benchmark of higher purpose” tattooed on her arse. When her husband moved out, he left behind his home gym and his elderly mother living in the spare bedroom. Her face in the mirror has begun to subside.
As Burnett puts it, the window of opportunity is closing in all sorts of ways for Nicola, who’s trying to put her foot in the door jamb of time. When she buys a red vinyl jumpsuit and decides to get her old band back together, what could possibly go wrong?
Burnett, an award-winning playwright and screenwriter whose show list includes The Tender Trap, My Life is Murder and The Brokenwood Mysteries, originally pitched the concept as a TV show. Now in her 50s, she says it’s a conversation many women have as they reach a certain point in their lives where everything is changing, from their bodies to how they’re perceived in the workplace.
“A really big moment for me was realising I had ideas for TV shows and plays and books that I wouldn’t live long enough to write,” she says. “Nicola Cheeseman is going through a grieving process, letting go of who she was. As much as it’s funny and rompy, it’s the story of a lost dream and the realisation that you just can’t go back.”
There’s power in embracing that – some variation of the line “Who the f*** decided I was in charge of happy?” is a recurring theme in the play. But channelling Cheeseman has been personally confronting for Rimmer.
Flashback to her 20s and she was playing Lilith in Young Hercules opposite Ryan Gosling – who was apparently an absolute darling – and a sexually liberated corporate lawyer in local TV series The Strip, which was set in a male strip club. (That’s when she first met Burnett, who was a lead writer on the show.) She nearly married Chris Warner before being exposed as a conwoman by Rachel McKenna on Shortland Street. And in 2005, she won a New Zealand Screen Award for her role in the gritty feature film In My Father’s Den.
Part of the prep for her new solo gig has been pulling out some of those old articles and photos of herself, which will be projected onto a big screen during the show. In many ways, it’s been a strange experience revisiting her past self.
“When I read the play, it was hilarious but also triggering for me because what the character is going through is so familiar,” she says. “She talks about her flaws as she’s ageing and her body type, which is not a size 10. That was quite confronting for me because as an actor, you’re always trying to keep up with appearances.
“I’ve had lots of coffees with friends where we’re grumbling about our faces falling off. But I don’t really feel that different. The essence of who we are is still there and I think that’s probably what happens for her.”
Rimmer was 12 when she landed her first professional acting job, a big TV commercial for the United Building Society, after her drama teacher recognised the girl had talent and suggested she sign up with an agent.
At 21, she went to the prestigious Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Perth, where Hugh Jackman trained as a young actor. In many ways, she loved it, but the style of teaching was brutal. Rimmer fell apart, descending into such a dark place her mother staged an intervention and brought her back home.
“I was always told I was a very instinctive actor, which was great, but this felt like being in the army,” she says. “That’s the particular way they run the drama schools there - they break you down and then build you up - but I took the breaking down very personally.
“It’s a confronting choice to be an actor. It’s hugely creative, but we have to face ourselves a lot of the time. And if you’re not in a good space, it can be, you know... a lot.”
She never returned to drama school but got back on her feet and within the year had landed her first feature film. Life has never again felt so bleak for Rimmer, who meditates regularly and thinks Kiwis still have an unhealthy tendency to repress their feelings. She and her ex-husband, entertainment lawyer Tim Riley, have remained good friends, co-parenting their boys Xavier, 14 and Theo, 12.
Even so, the past few years have been rough. In 2021, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, an excruciatingly painful inflammatory disorder that made it feel like she was walking on glass. When she was filming the first series of TV drama Friends Like Her (streaming on ThreeNow), steroid medication had puffed up her face.
The condition is now largely under control, but there were days when she would have struggled to drag herself out of bed if it hadn’t been for her rescue dog Hiwa needing a walk.
Throughout her career, Rimmer has repeatedly tried to break away from acting, with its erratic paychecks and emotional toll: a flirtation with teacher training, a Bachelor of Social Practice degree (her mother was a social worker), a job selling fine wine. She’s been sucked back into orbit every time.
So has her son Theo, who’s signed with a top agent and showed remarkable screen presence as a victim of sexual abuse in the recent docu-drama The Lost Boys of Dilworth.
Her father, Bill (who separated from her mother many years ago), has also got in on the act. Rimmer talked him into auditioning as a potential suitor in the recent TV show James Must-a-pic His Mum a Man. He and comedian James Mustapic’s mum, Janet, hit it off and are now dating.
Rimmer’s recent work includes Kiwi comedy film Nude Tuesday, hit Netflix series Sweet Tooth and a role last year in another Kathryn Burnett play, Mike and Virginia. Still, it’s slim picking for women in their 50s, despite what she calls the Robyn Malcolm effect, referencing the international acclaim for Malcolm’s performance in After the Party, playing a woman Rimmer describes as “utterly real and flawed”.
Burnett says she loves writing roles for women her own age because there’s so much great talent to choose from, yet it’s so underutilised. Rimmer was only 42 when she went back on the books after taking four years out of the industry to start a family. Despite her glittering CV, there was nothing but “tumbleweeds”. These days, she says, a role for a mother with children the age of her own two boys would likely go to an actress in her mid-30s.
To supplement her income, she works in schools teaching mindfulness, meditation and drama, and runs acting classes at Auckland’s Empire Studios. In the past 12 months, she’s auditioned for several upcoming roles and come agonisingly close.
“You’d think it would get easier, the knockbacks,” she says. “But you might as well come 20th when you’re relying on it for a living - to run the house, pay the mortgage, feed the kids… I keep saying this will be my last show. But, of course, I’m having such a great time and it brings me so much joy. You’re fooling yourself to think you can let that go.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
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