Actor Sophie Hambleton with then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern during a visit to the Beehive in 2021. Hambleton is reprising her role as Ardern in a new play.
Actor Sophie Hambleton talks to Joanna Wane about playing Dame Jacinda Ardern, the most loved and hated Prime Minister in New Zealand’s history
“Ardern is cancer.” This message, posted on social media just a few days ago by a right-wing blogger, shows how incendiary Dame Jacinda Ardern remains in the national consciousness – 65 weeks and six days after she resigned as Prime Minister. But when actor Sophie Hambleton first played her on stage, two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, the woman heading New Zealand’s team of five million was being hailed as our most popular PM in a century.
The ferocity of the backlash still shocks Hambleton, who met Ardern for a brief “gal-pal chat” at the Beehive before the show opened in 2021 and is about to renew their peculiarly intimate relationship in a new sequel that traces the Labour leader’s downfall.
“You still have the Jacinda lovers who religiously use their Jacinda tea towels, but the tide really turned against her,” she says. “Imagine hearing people outside your place of work baying for your blood. I remember watching her press conferences and announcements at the time, and thinking, ‘Damn, girl, you look rinsed.’ You could see that physically, it was taking a toll. And then watching the resignation and thinking something in her had been broken.”
Hambleton is probably best known as Carol, the loyal but ditzy blonde who lurched from one catastrophe to another in the Outrageous Fortune prequel Westside, and turned out to be pretty handy in a fight. In one all-out pub brawl, she leapt to her husband’s defence by glassing his attacker in the face.
Channelling Ardern in the 2021 verbatim play Transmission required a more subtle approach. A fascinating insight into the behind-the-scenes political machinations that shaped New Zealand’s response to the pandemic, events unfold primarily through the eyes of three public figures: Ardern, her deputy and Minister of Finance Grant Robertson and epidemiologist Michael Baker.
Instead of creating a fictionalised drama, the script was constructed by husband-and-wife collaborators Stuart McKenzie and Dame Miranda Harcourt from a series of revealing face-to-face interviews with the key players, whose words are spoken verbatim by the actors on stage.
Living with the PM’s voice inside her head has been a surreal experience for Hambleton, who doesn’t dress as Ardern or try to look like her on stage. “I knew it would be very naturalistic, not an impersonation,” she says. “And I have to honour what’s in the script because that’s exactly what she said.
“What struck me playing her is what she represented — all of our opinions, feelings, questions, thoughts and worries were centred on her. That’s the job and it comes with the territory. But when you think how everyone loved Ashley Bloomfield! And actually, it was his call. He was the one who wanted us all vaccinated, but no one talks about him anymore.”
Transmission, which sold out before opening night, ends on a high with the successful elimination of the virus after a two-month nationwide lockdown. Delta, Omicron, the vaccination rollout, the MIQ fiasco and the crippling second wave of home confinement were yet to come.
Now, Hambleton is about to slip back into the former PM’s shoes for the second half of the story. Transmission: Beta, co-directed by Harcourt and McKenzie, opens at Wellington’s Circa Theatre on May 18. And this time, it’s going to get ugly. Traversing the emotional and economic fallout from the virus, including vaccine mandates and the fiery occupation at Parliament, Beta documents a fracturing of society that’s been arguably as divisive as the 1981 Springbok Tour.
While the spotlight remains on the same core trio, a wider range of perspectives are presented: a vaccine scientist, anti-mandate protesters, MIQ residents, economist Bernard Hickey, Māori health advocate John Tamihere and the Assistant Commissioner of Police, Richard Chambers. The toxic misogyny that was unleashed on social media gets an airing, too.
One section of the play is called Telegram, a reference to the instant messaging platform that’s notorious for its lack of controls on hate speech. Harcourt says that when McKenzie told her he’d finished writing that bit, she asked him to read it aloud. “He went, ‘Well, trigger warning. It’s pretty dark.’”
McKenzie had continued to record interviews with Ardern, Robertson and Baker as the pandemic response began to unravel. He says they remained extremely open, trusting and generous with their time, despite facing mounting pressure as the public mood turned sour. “There were some people that if my phone rang with their name on it, I had to sit down,” Ardern told him. “Every time it would feel like my insides hit the floor. And I would go light-headed and feel sick. That’s how it felt every time I was told we had a case.”
Roberston said doing the interviews was a bit like psychoanalysis at times, says McKenzie, who describes the “beautiful friendship” between Ardern and her deputy as the emotional heart of the play. “It wasn’t until Jacinda resigned that we went, okay, we’ve got an ending.”
For Transmission: Beta, the cast has been expanded to five but of the original actors, only Hambleton remains. Tim Spite, who played Michael Baker, runs his own building company now and can’t afford to take the time off. Tom Knowles, who made such a convincing Grant Robertson, isn’t returning either. Hambleton, his real-life partner, has pulled rank and left him at home in Auckland with their two-year-old daughter, Marley Rose.
Marley Rose is just a couple of years younger than Ardern and Clarke Gayford’s daughter, Neve, and becoming a mother has given Hambleton a deeper empathy for the sacrifices politicians make in their personal lives. (Not just politicians: in the first play, TVNZ journalist Mei Heron, who had a young child of her own, talks about what it was like to cover those frightening early days of the pandemic, stripping off all her clothes as soon as she got home to avoid infecting her family.)
“Neve would have been just 1 or 2 and I can’t imagine how much time [Ardern] spent away from her, when all you’d want to do is be at home with your child,” says Hambleton. “The line that makes me choke up is when she talks about listening to Clarke give Neve a bath. Now that I’m a mum myself and going away for this second play, that feels like quite a huge thing for me.”
Transmission: Beta is the first theatre project Hambleton has taken on since Marley Rose was born, but she jumped at the chance to work with McKenzie and Harcourt, who pioneered verbatim theatre in New Zealand in the 90s. Harcourt acted for many years with her father, Peter, and taught Hambleton at Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School. The two families were so close that Hambleton used to babysit their children, Thomasin and Davida, now both accomplished actors themselves, and Peter, an award-winning journalist.
McKenzie has learnt to follow Hambleton’s instincts when it comes to drawing out Ardern’s complexities beyond the political facade. “I’m just always blown away by watching Sophie,” he says. “She’s so emotionally attuned, but also very smart and transformative. She’s very different from Jacinda and she looks very different, but when you see her on stage, you feel the spirit of Jacinda. It is her.”
As part of their research for Transmission: Beta, both McKenzie and Harcourt spent time mingling with the protesters at Parliament grounds. While they witnessed fringe elements that were violent and destructive, a few friends from within the arts sector were among those who strongly objected to the vaccine mandates.
As well as playing Ardern, Hambleton voices an anti-mandate protester who talks passionately about her beliefs and the sense of community she felt during the 28 days of the occupation. Hambleton, who was heavily pregnant by the time Delta began circulating, stayed well away from the protests and was fully vaccinated on medical advice.
“Presenting that character was fascinating; she wasn’t there to try and hang Jacinda from a tree, but what she did believe was so deep for her, around choice and trust and human rights. The play gives space for those voices and I’ve got to find space in my heart for that too.”
Stepping in for Knowles as Grant Robertson is Simon Leary, a familiar face on the Wellington theatre scene. Nigel Collins, an actor and musician who’s collaborated with Flight of the Conchords, plays Michael Baker, as well as economist Bernard Hickey and the Assistant Commissioner of Police.
Baker told McKenzie that personal attacks on both himself and Ardern had begun to circulate on Telegram in early 2022. At that time, about 250,000 New Zealanders were active on the platform. Now, the number is closer to 1.2 million. Ardern has remained a target for the most extreme vitriol. An online hate tracker that looked at seven high-profile politicians and officials from 2019 to 2022 found 93 per cent of toxic posts were directed at her, with a total of 5438 abusive messages.
Last month, a University of Otago study focused on the Covid-19 recovery era reported that more than a quarter of the 54 MPs who were surveyed had received death threats and 40 per cent had been threatened with physical violence. Two-thirds of women MPs reported feeling fearful for their safety.
“I hope people see the play and go wow, there’s a bunch of remarkable people who have been working on our behalf and have copped a lot of shit, but actually they’ve sacrificed a lot for the wellbeing of the country,” says McKenzie. “You can’t possibly get everything right because there are always unintended consequences nobody can ever predict. But we won’t have a democracy if we’re just going to shoot them down all the time in this kind of toxic warfare.”
For Hambleton, the collision between Ardern’s public and private lives revealed itself in the small details. When she visited the Beehive, what caught her eye was a pink plastic tea set on the boardroom table next to the PM’s office and a wicker basket of toys tucked away in one corner.
Ardern didn’t do everything right, Hambleton acknowledges. “But she was also a mother, a fiancee, and a woman who is warm and funny and engaging and personable,” she says. “I asked her if she felt pressure, as a woman, to always look smart. She said it came with the job, as a world leader.
“But it’s like an armour too, because no matter how you feel on the inside, if you’ve got your hair done and a bit of slap on and a nice blazer, you’re in your uniform in a way. And I really understood that, especially as an actor, because it’s like stepping into character.”
• Transmission: Beta is on at Wellington’s Circa Theatre from May 18 to June 15.
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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