Márton Csókás. Photo / Jen Raoult
Márton Csókás, the New Zealand actor talks with Joanna Mathers.
Márton Csókás is in Lithuania. It's 10am in the Baltic state, and he's in a cafe, I think. In rare moments of silence, the background hum is littered with clinks of cups and snatches of conversation. I picture him seated at a Vilnius eatery, tall, brooding, his black coffee cooling on a table.
I don't know why Márton Csókás is in Lithuania. The topic doesn't arise and I doubt he'd have told me. I also don't know if he was in a cafe. The successful New Zealand actor, who appeared on our screens in the early 1990s as Shortland Street's bespectacled Dr Leonard Dodds, speaks in stream-of-consciousness slabs about everything from gardening to the acting methodology of Stanislavski. But his life outside acting is out of bounds.
"I don't want to talk about that, but I respect that you need to ask," is the stock answer.
Polite, erudite, charming . . . and a mystery.
A prolific and celebrated classical theatre actor, the past two decades have seen Csókás appear in a dizzying array of blockbusters: The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Sin City, The Equalizer, The Bourne Supremacy et al). There's a raft of small-screen series as well, including The Luminaries, Sons of Liberty and Into the Badlands.
But this on-screen visibility is a foil for real-life invisibility. He has a remarkably small online footprint. Google tells me he was romantically linked to New Zealand actor Lucy Lawless and the delectable French actor Eva Green (with whom he co-starred in The Luminaries). His current relationship status is unknown.
He does reveal he has a 10-year-old daughter. Both of them live in Italy. He won't tell me her name.
"She's never been to New Zealand," he says. "But she loves Maui and all the mythology surrounding him. And she knows that New Zealand is part of her life."
Csókás is set to appear on New Zealand screens again in Juniper, the big-screen feature debut of director Matthew J Saville, alongside celebrated British actor Charlotte Rampling.
Here Csókás plays Robert, the son of alcoholic Ruth (Rampling), and absent father of teenage Sam (played by George Ferrier). Much of his dialogue is delivered via phoneline in the film (his character is often in England) and the distance reinforces the films twin themes of absence and loss.
Csókás says he was drawn to the script. The way in which it dealt with grief and transformation, and brought up challenging questions.
"It's a family story about father and son, and about people passing on," he says. "Most people have had experiences like this; have had to wrangle oneself through experiences of trial and tribulation. I was interested in how people deal with an ocean of grief."
Juniper is a million miles away from the Hollywood movies that have become Csókás' bread-and-butter (caviar and Champagne?).
His career decisions have always been "pragmatic", but he admires "creative purity". Films like Juniper allow him to explore "serious" acting. He's got the chops, starring in the classics – Twelfth Night, The Cherry Orchard – in some of the world's best theatres.
He speaks with admiration of the artists who remain true to "the ideal of creativity".
"I admire people who are committed to the purity of their art. People like Michael Parmenter, who make sacrifices for their creative work. But it's not for me. I like to have money in my pocket."
He's experienced the opposite. He tells me that, living in Sydney as a young man, he worked full-time as a dish-washer for two years. "The owners told me that I could make more money as a waiter, but I was so shy I couldn't walk across the room."
The financial realities of "pure art" were revealed during his first dramatic outing, the play Te Whanau a Tuanui Jones, by Apirana Taylor.
"It was a great play and really of its time. It was wonderful to fully inhabit the world of stage. A wonderful collaboration, that was so popular, it kept running for 10 weeks."
At the end of the season, he recalls a long speech by director Jim Moriarty.
"I could sense something was coming. It transpired that we got $96 for our 10 weeks work."
Creative purity/financial disaster. Flipsides of the same coin. "I'm pragmatic, I take the jobs that come my way."
Csókás was born in Invercargill in 1966 to a "glorious" English/Irish/Danish mother, "the spawn of maritime stock". His father (also Márton Csókás) escaped the horrors of World War II Hungary, leaving behind an artistic life that included opera singing and trapeze for the Hungarian Circus.
Although his father never returned to the stage, Csókás remembers his voice echoing through the house. But his Csókás junior's decision to become an actor, was a flashpoint in their relationship.
"He was set against it … there was a showdown. He was not shy in telling me what he thought, I was so upset that he didn't support me. But it made me even more determined to be successful."
His voice trails off, quavering. "Sorry I can't talk about it. It was very primal … "
Csókás' childhood was spent in between Aotearoa and Australia, his father's work as a mechanical engineer was itinerant. An early relocation to Sydney was instrumental in a burgeoning love of culture. His family settled in a street populated by European expats – from Turkey, Croatia – when Csókás was a pre-schooler. He recalls house parties, lunches, a free-range childhood.
"I would wander into different houses, and my mother would call up looking for me. They'd say: 'don't worry, Márton is here'."
Sydney was also Csókás' (somewhat ignominious) introduction to acting.
"I played Prince Charming in a school production of Sleeping Beauty. I wandered on set, dressed in green crepe paper. I was meant to kiss the girl on the cheek to wake her up, but I was so shy that I just stood there and kissed her hand instead."
He wouldn't make another stage appearance for decades. But he recalls pivotal moments during this latency. Small epiphanies that awakened his curiosity around the potential of the arts.
At school in Pukekohe (he moved here after Sydney) he remembers Māori songs and dances at school. And local theatre gave him a glimpse into the world on stage.
"I remember my mother taking me to a theatre production of Brigadoon. I was entranced, watching people singing behind a cardboard bridge, then looking at the audience and thinking 'wow, it's possible to have a world within a world'."
Independent world travel after school also provided rich nutrients for the yet-to-be actor. So much that upon his return to New Zealand, in Csókás trained at Te Kuri Toi Whakaari o Aotearoa/New Zealand Drama School. Thereafter followed Shortland Street, Xena, and a three-decade dream run.
Now 55, Csókás looks back on a life characterised by "restlessness". This, he believes, he inherited from his father: always on the move. He's lived in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, now Italy. Underpinning this itinerancy, he says, is a deep questioning of "who am I"?
Csókás views acting as a process of self-knowledge. He doesn't believe that the self is subsumed by the experience of playing a role, in fact, he believes that getting lost in roles is an act of "self-deception".
"Acting is like being a carpenter. You don't become what you make."
Covid 19 lockdown in Italy (one of the first countries to be slammed by the pandemic) necessarily curtailed his wanderlust, but offered Csókás the space for self-exploration.
"My heart really goes out to those who have suffered," he prefaces. "But there was a great productivity for me during lockdown, including a collaboration with an Italian friend of mine, poet Gabriele Tinti, that has resulted in a quite intense and mad album called 'Embracing the Ruins'."
Released on the esoteric House of Mythology label, the collaboration between Csókás, Tinti, and composer Massimo Pupillo, Embracing the Ruins features characters drawn from the Greek myths; "the muses, the slaves, enable 'the actor' to inhabit the essential struggle of what it is to be human, like a Noh play, doomed to repetition and the transcendence gained from it, to be human under the burning sun, which both gives life and destroys" (or so the label says).
Although he admits lockdown was sometimes "claustrophobic", he also relished "sinking more deeply" into self.
"I discovered some deeply challenging but also essential things."
After 40 minutes, our conversation comes to an end. It's been a heady, esoteric, exhilarating ride. But I realise, as a switch off the phone, I'm still in the dark. Csókás is still a mystery.
I guess that's part of his charm.
Juniper opens in NZ cinemas on October 28.
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