Kevin Smith follows in Brando's footsteps

New Zealand's best-known brooding heterosexual, Kevin Smith, is treading the boards in a role made famous by
Marlon Brando. GILBERT WONG gets up close and personal in the gym.

Kevin Smith selects a set of barbells, sits on a bench in a Newmarket gym and begins to do curls. He's taken off his flannel shirt and his upper torso bulges visibly as the veins on his arms, articulated like a relief map of the tributaries of a river, pump blood. He breathes out with a conscious huff.

We wanted an interesting photo and Smith obligingly agreed to come to the gym. Initially I thought we could do weights together. We might bond, rather than interviewer and subject, we could just be two blokes working out. After a preliminary heft of the weights I decide it's a bad idea. Let's just stick to the roles, matey.

That Smith is so obliging is part of his persona, the genuine Kiwi bloke, who affects none of the airs and luvvie pretension that can come with theatrical types.

He's 38, been married for 12 years to Suzanne, has three boys - Oscar, 10, Tyrone, 7 and Willard, almost 4 - but Smith can't escape the beefcake image and nor, it could be argued, does he necessarily want to.

"I don't think the public persona has grown organically, I've supported it," he admits, "but I just find the hunk description limiting."

Age may change that. "Before, I was always the brooding heterosexual, you know, 'Whoops a strong wind comes along, whoops my shirt's come right off'."

Yet does he complain too much? For the photos, he takes off his shirt without prompting. Without a word he knows what we want and seems happy to supply it.

The typecasting he talks of is, in part, why he took on roles that were unexpected or that parodied Kevin Smith the brand. Most recently he appeared in July in the Michael Hurst-directed pseudo-documentary Love Mussel, in which Hurst, playing the producer, tells Smith, playing himself, "I'm looking for a B-grade telly celebrity".

The funny thing, says Smith, who enjoys a bit of self-mockery, is that's exactly the line Hurst used to pitch him the role for real. "Yeah, thanks, Michael," he laughs.

It is by no means certain that his next theatre role, as the glowering Stanley Kowalski in the Auckland Theatre Company production of A Streetcar Named Desire, will do anything to dispel that image.

The Tennessee Williams play is best-known by its film which, Smith remarks, was a genuine soundbite of the 20th century. The role of Stanley made Marlon Brando and the T-shirt a star and had a hundred young male actors bellowing: "Stella!" into a night of existential hell.

Smith figured his public persona was changing. He had successfully asked his voracious American fan club to stop actively running the website full of shots of him as, well, a glowering heterosexual war god from Hercules and Xena.

He made a film, Channelling Baby, with Danielle Cormack. But then came The Blue Room and the nude sex scenes with Cormack which, while never gratuitous, did draw a gratuitous audience, including one ardent fan who swiped his undies from the small Herald Theatre stage one night.

The Streetcar production arrives with attendant publicity shots that show Smith, well, glowering and heterosexual.

Back in the Clive Green gym in Newmarket, where Smith has been a 5.30 am regular for 12 years, the analogy must be that Smith is like a professional rugby player.

Like it or not his body and looks have been his fortune. Like professional sportsmen, he knows his playing weights and recites them as vital statistics.

To play Ares he bulked up to 98kg, for The Blue Room he slimmed down to 81kg. To play Stanley he's pumped back up to 90kg. He was going to build up more but director Simon Prast said no, "too much of a statement".

He shrugs his shoulders. "All I can do is get to a place where I'm comfortable with what I am. I am at that stage where the work I feel like doing is stuff they would never cast 'Kevin Smith' for. Sometimes they cast you because they have an idea of you and it takes the guesswork out of casting."

Smith has played Stanley before, at the Court Theatre when he was 26 and a freshly minted actor. Elric Hooper was the director, Cathy Downes played Blanche, Geraldine Brophy Stella and Paul Barrett Mitch. In this production Elizabeth Hawthorne is Blanche, Danielle Cormack is Stella and Michael Lawrence Mitch.

A few days ago he got out the scrapbooks and had a quiet shudder. "It's a mocking thing," he says of playing a role at 38 that you essayed at 26. "I thought I made, not so much mistakes, but I may have missed some beats as Stanley. As a young man you focus on the rage rather than understand the reason for it."

Stanley could be a monster. He is an abusive, grasping misogynist who rapes his sister-in-law.

"The things that Stanley is fighting for are the very things I have: a home and a family. It's your piece of the rock. I can understand why he does what he does.

"The rape of Blanche is beyond the pale but you think, given the right circumstances and events, how far away is Kev Smith from Stanley when it comes to protecting his own?"

Smith says Stanley has so much to lose. He's a first-generation American building a life. "He has a woman he loves and a home that runs. Blanche destabilises it all. In a very real sense Blanche and Stanley are fighting for their lives.

"The terrible things that Stanley does are purely acts of pragmatism. I'm not suggesting that I condone anything that he does but you can find a pathway into Stanley's way of thinking."

Smith fell into acting by chance. He was injured in a rugby accident and his future wife set him up for an audition for a touring show, Are You Lonesome Tonight? The Elvis Presley Story. That tanked, but acting had snared him.

He has sung in bands, notably Christchurch's Say Yes to Apes, which put out three albums, and has performed stand-up comedy, but an actor is what he is.

"Because I didn't start in the business until reasonably late, I feel I'm nowhere near where I want to be as an actor.

"I want to have my little actor's toolshed all set up with the silhouettes of the tools all neat and arranged on the wall. I just want to get my stuff in order."

He's nearing 40. There are strands of grey hair above his pair of jaunty golden pirate's earrings. His agent and friend Robert Bruce told the twentysomething Smith that he would be the sort of actor who would not come into his own until his 40s. Smith sounds like he can't wait.

* A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, directed by Simon Prast, Auckland Theatre Company, opens at the Maidment Theatre on Friday.