Nicola Murphy - Unexpected double movie exposure

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

All of a sudden, Nicola Murphy has become the poster girl of New Zealand movies. The Auckland actor has two features out back to back. She's Rose in Magik and Rose, the low-budget, high-charm comedy drama about making babies set down Hokitika way which is still attracting a word-of-mouth following at the few cinemas it's playing.

And there's the upcoming Wild Blue, the fabulously wholesome, terribly scenic tale of family life, aviation and romance set on a farm in Central Otago.

Watching both very different films, it's clear that the New Zealand Drama School graduate (1993) and stage veteran is just one of those people the camera likes very much.

Television cameras, too — she did a four-month stint on Shortland Street last year as Jean Burroughs, the functioning heroin addict girlfriend of nurse Mike Galloway (Oliver Driver, also in Magik).

"It was short enough for it not to be penalising in the way it can be, though good actors it will never penalise. It's a lot of fun but it's also an insular world. It's quite interesting to go in and be part of it for the short time that I was."

But she hasn't seen a set in a while thanks to the arrival of her first baby three months ago which enforced a period of acting unemployment.

Yes, she laughs, the story in Magik and Rose, where she plays half of a couple who can't conceive, might have had something to do with her and her partner's decision to have a child. "A lot of people said to me, 'Is that why you had a baby?' and I actually think in a funny way it's why we thought, 'Well maybe we'll see if we can."'

It's odd, she laughs, that her other productions have arrived at much the same time, too. She made Wild Blue
nearly three years ago and Magik and Rose in 1998.

In Wild Blue she plays Hannah Howie, a young solo mum who slowly falls for a visiting American topdressing pilot (played by Judge Reinhold, peren-nial Hollywood sidekick) while dealing with a dyslexic son, an ailing grandfather, and the local PTA. That's in between mountain-skimming flights in the family Tiger Moth biplane.

It's another cheap and cheerful effort from Dale and Grant Bradley's Daybreak Pictures which looks like its funding should be from the Tourism Board, not the Film Commission, and Murphy is quite the best thing in it.

"Yes it's a very wholesome film but from the point of view of a woman in her late 20s it was a fantastic opportunity to play the lead role."

But she admires the Bradleys' thoroughly pragmatic approach to making movies: "They are making more films than anyone else in New Zealand because they start by sitting around the table going 'What is going to sell?' and as much as they're not doing risky stuff, they are selling them."

While it may look like all of it was set in snow-capped Central Otago, much of the filming was done near Auckland with a week around Wanaka. There were quite a few scenes where she and Reinhold are sitting in the Tiger Moth's open cockpit pretending to be airborne, but she did go up in the biplane, which she describes as the film's real central character. "That was amazing. What a fantastic experience. Your face and head is to the wind, it's just glorious."

Nice fellow, that Reinhold chap?

"To be perfectly honest we didn't have heaps to do with each other. He was in his considerably long caravan and I was in my considerably small caravan — the indicator of how important you are. He was very professional and very focused and I saw him for the scenes and we did our stuff. We didn't become great friends or anything."

Murphy says that Magik and Rose was more of a labour of love as she had worked with director Vanessa Alexander during its development and grew into the part along the way.

While it hasn't exactly set the New Zealand box office alight, it's still attracting audiences a few months after its release, which Murphy finds heartening.

"Yeah, the other thing that is difficult about it is you've got your two women lead characters, which is not really appealing to your usual audience which is teenagers. I think it's a 20-and-up movie, a lot of my Mum and Dad's friends have loved it. It's really working in the rural areas."

But Murphy isn't working in the urban area she calls home. She may be that poster girl but right now she's a mum and a teacher of English as a second language ("I make them do lots of little plays," she says of her students). Such is the Kiwi actor's lot, even seemingly successful ones. Not that it worries her: "If something doesn't come along I'm quite happy to get on with the other things in my life. If something comes along, fantastic. Otherwise I would like to make something happen."

* Wild Blue opens at Rialto cinemas on Thursday October 26.