Kiwi actor adds thorns to sweet fence-climbing rose

Melanie Lynskey brings a crazy feminine side to Two and a Half Men.

Just when you think actors live a fairytale of red carpet premieres, Paris Hilton parties and three-week marriages, along comes someone who disregards the fanfare like a true blue Kiwi.

Take former New Plymouth girl Melanie Lynskey, who stars as Charlie Sheen's sweet but slightly crazy neighbour in Two and a Half Men, the sitcom that is saving the genre's bacon in the United States. Oh, and by the way, she's she's just finished shooting the film, Flags of our Fathers, directed by Clint Eastwood. How does one juggle the arduous task of mingling with Bad Boy Sheen and an Oscar-winning legend?

"I was really missing making movies so I asked at the beginning of season if they would let me open my contract up so I was on the show a little bit less," she says matter-of-factly on the line from LA. "And they were really kind."

Whether or not niceties had anything to do with it, few other Kiwi actors could pull such strings.

The discussion would likely have been with big-wig producer Chuck Lorre (Dharma & Greg, Cybill, Roseanne), and would have probably taken place on the set, a few metres from where Friends was filmed. Since Two and a Half Men started, it has consistently been in the top 20 US shows, rating almost as well as now-defunct favourite, Everybody Loves Raymond. Yet any acknowledgment of its magnitude is laughed off in her high-pitched, feminine voice, not unlike her character's.

"In Los Angeles everyone's so jaded and everyone's in the industry so you don't really feel it when you're here. But my boyfriend's family lives in Arizona so whenever we go there people are, like, freaking out about the show. I went to New Orleans a while ago and everyone there was so excited. When you go outside of Los Angeles it's full of people who are watching it and it always surprises me."

When fans approach her in the street, however, she finds it's for other things: Kate Winslet's love interest and fellow murderer in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, Reese Witherspoon's friend in Sweet Home Alabama, Piper Perabo's childhood chum in Coyote Ugly, Katie Holmes' stalker in Abandon or Drew Barrymore's stepsister in Ever After. "In real life I don't think I look very much like Rose because she's so specific."

Indeed, Rose might seem like a walk in the park to play compared with some of her other roles - channelling lesbian killer instincts can't have been easy - but it took Lynskey a while to get to grips with the rules of comedy. She'd never done it before, and had to learn.

"I go back and look at the pilot and I'm just like 'Oh my God, I had no idea what I was doing'. I was yelling a little bit because the laughter of the audience was so freaky to try and work with. I can't believe they didn't fire me after that. It's strange, it's kind of like doing a play but a little more challenging. I think I'm lucky in that I have an unusual character. You never know where she's gonna go or what she's gonna say."

The producers made Rose, who never forgot her one-night-stand with Charlie, a core cast member after her popularity as a guest star in the pilot. As one TV critic put it, Rose is "a great mix of funny and creepy", and if anyone's to blame, it's Lynskey. It was her idea to make the girl-next-door err on the stalker side. Much of her time is spent peering over Charlie's fence waiting for an invitation to come over - even hopping into Charlie's bed, uninvited.

"If someone says, 'I'm not going to go out with you', it's not in me to try and change their minds. But she's so persistent. There's a few things that I've done in the show where I've been like, 'Really? Are people going to hate me if I do this?"'

Needless to say it's been a difficult year for the real Charlie. While the world's tabloids have feasted on his marriage problems, Lynskey says he was always open and honest with the cast and crew. "He never wants there to be any awkwardness or for anyone to be like, 'What's happening?' y'know. I just feel bad for him that he has to go through all this, people stalking him with cameras and having it written about all over the place."

Not that Sheen's public lynching has put her off the job she loves. She agrees a sitcom star's salary is not to be sneezed at. But she's not one to splash out on an extravagant lifestyle, "hates" premieres, and though her boyfriend is an actor, she reckons he's "as un-Hollywood as they get".

The couple live not far from the show's Burbank studios, in an "artsy, cool, interesting" community full of families, galleries and boutique clothing stores.

"The happiest thing for me to do is to get some nice wine and get some food and have friends over for dinner and play poker. That's what we do." So she can't understand why she'd pretend to be a part of the Hollywood set. Plenty of people have presumed she is. And why wouldn't they? She pulls off the accent perfectly, calls cafes "coffee shops" and has a surname that doesn't exactly announce her heritage.

"When I first came here, someone said to me 'You know you should walk in with an American accent and pretend you're American'. And I was like, 'Why would I do that?' I'd feel like I was lying. I think it's more interesting to be from somewhere else but I guess some people get freaked out and think, 'Oh she's a foreigner'."

Lynskey misses lots of things about New Zealand. Her best friend has moved back after seven years in Europe, and she admits to feeling jealous that the daily commute is a serene ferry ride from Waiheke Island to the city.

"To be able to live in a place that looks like paradise instead of sitting in jam-packed crazy Los Angeles traffic ... " Her voice trails off. "But I would love to play Rose forever if I could. I'm very happy."