Greg Bruce meets Chess The Musical star Edward Laurenson
We met over a chess board in the living room of a beautiful modern home in Parnell. The fire was on and an extremely large cat was stretched out in front of it, asleep. Rising operatic star Edward Laurenson walked in wearing a tux, looking like a movie star, specifically the movie star Robert Pattinson, who is most famous for playing the hot, pasty vampire Edward from the Twilight films. I had known about this resemblance in advance, because when the publicist first got in touch about this story, she had attached a picture of Laurenson and another of Pattinson and the only reason I could tell them apart was because Pattinson's featured a GQ logo. In real life, the resemblance was, if anything, even more striking.
Laurenson, 33, told me there had been a point in his life, around the peak of Twilight mania, when five or six people a day were approaching him because of the resemblance. He was once denied service in a bar because they believed his ID, featuring the name Edward, was a fake. These looks presumably did not hurt his chances during casting for the upcoming New Zealand production of Chess, in which he was chosen to play the Russian, Anatoly, alongside former New Zealand Idol runner-up Michael Murphy.
The primary reason for our meeting was to talk about his role in the show and the reason for the chess board was because the publicist for the show had told me Laurenson was a chess champion with, she believed, an international ranking. I believed, wrongly as it turned out, that it would be interesting to incorporate a game of chess into this story about Chess. Not only had I never played chess, but I wasn't even sure of the correct name for the horses. I had never had much facility for games of strategy and we only had an hour. Nevertheless, we tried. He set up the pieces in a late game position from a famous match involving an American grandmaster who I'd never heard of - not Bobby Fischer or the woman from The Queen's Gambit. When he'd finished setting up, I asked which of us was in the stronger position. He told me he was.
