Dr Chris Warner, played by Michael Galvin, is the only original Shortland Street character still on screen. Photo / Matt Klitscher
Dr Love has survived everything from car crashes to shootings to a flying fox. What’s coming in the 2023 Shortland Street cliffhanger? Michael Galvin on why Dr Chris Warner is in it for the long haul.
“Who’d have me?”
Michael Galvin sits outside the staff cafeteria at South Pacific Pictures drinking coffee from a paper cup.
It’s November, a month from the Shortland Street cliffhanger, and that time of year when actors read their scripts with trepidation.
Writers have been killing characters since the medical soap’s inception. Galvin should know - he was there at Ground Zero.
On May 25, 1992, Tina Cross sang the theme tune, policewomen wore skirts and the hospital chief executive used a car phone the size of his head. There was gypsophila (without irony) in the reception desk bouquet and Galvin’s Dr Chris Warner was shagging a married aerobics instructor.
Galvin is Shortland Street’s only original cast member and the show’s longest-serving actor. Would he ever leave?
“Who’d have me?” he repeats. “What would I do for a living?”
Recently, when Herald was brainstorming story ideas, our thoughts turned to the annual Shortland Street cliffhanger. “Kill Chris Warner now!” I said. “Is Michael Galvin the most boring actor on television? Would he agree to that interview?”
Incredibly, yes. And here we are in Henderson, Auckland. Coffee, sunshine, and Galvin in a T-shirt the colour of the French Riviera with a tan to match - though it is unlikely he got that tan in Nice or St Tropez or absolutely anywhere else in France.
“When I have holidays, I just stay in Auckland. I just stay at home and do nothing. I’m in Point Chev, so maybe I’ll wander down to the beach. I do nothing.”
Yes, he insists: “I’m very boring. I love doing nothing. I love it and I’m getting better at it.”
Galvin did, way back when, take a four-year break from Shortland Street. He returned in 2000 and, 23 consecutive years later, parallels with other elder statesmen of television soaps are - give or take a decade or so - unavoidable. William Roache, for example, has been playing Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow for 63 years. In Australia, Ray Meagher has clocked up 35 years as Home and Away’s Alf Stewart. Does Galvin mind these comparisons?
“What people think of me is their business,” says Galvin. “It’s as big and as small as that. And I don’t mean that in a mean way. You know, you can look down on me and feel sorry for me, or look up to me and be jealous of me and it’s all the same.”
He feels “incredibly lucky” to have landed this gig - and if he didn’t love it, viewers would notice.
“It perfectly matches the life I want to live, whereby I have a job and I feel useful and I’m able to provide for my daughter and I get to act.
“You need a certain level of enthusiasm and energy to make a convincing performance. If you’re not enjoying it, it will show through when you’re acting. Unless you’re playing an incredibly, permanently, embittered soul, it won’t be convincing.”
Shortland Street historians record almost 80 significant deaths across the show’s 31-year history. In its first three years, Miles Lucas overdosed (1992), Tom Neilson went to the dairy for milk, joined a cult and had a heart attack (1993) and Talita “TP” Aleni was trapped in an exploding car (1994).
There have been shootings, stranglings and candlesticks to the head. Cancer, a Strep B infection and complications from a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Let’s not even try to recap the convoluted series of events that simultaneously took out Dr Sarah Potts and proved no actor was immune to a deadly storyline.
How will Dr Warner die? Galvin has thoughts.
“I’m in the scene and suddenly I go, ‘There’s no fourth wall. There’s no roof. And then I walk out and I go, ‘it’s not a real hospital.’ What I’m trying to say is I want the show not to exist if I’m not on it. If I’m going, I want to take the show with me.”
How do the superfans want Chris Warner to die? At the time of our interview, Galvin’s character was off-screen at an overseas conference. A friend - who watches the omnibus edition every weekend - hypothesised a cliffhanger on a plane. Perhaps a hijacking. “Dr Love has never been in a plane crash,” she said.
“I f***ing have,” said Galvin. “Chris took the wheel!”
Let’s talk about Dr Warner’s near-death experiences. Car crashes, cancer, brain damage from an incident on a flying fox . . .
“That’s right. That’s when Chris got into hedgehogs. He was very, very excited about the hedgehogs in his backyard.”
Fires, shootings, explosions . . .
“Oh, yeah. Volcanoes. There was a volcano! He was shot through the heart.”
Galvin, 57, finishes the sentence full Bon Jovi “. . . And you’re to blame . . . "
Stabbings? Electrocutions?
“Look, they’ve done everything. I must have, somewhere along the line - no, wait, it was Rachel who got electrocuted and then fell in love with Nick Harrison until she got electrocuted again and was cured of it. No, that hasn’t happened to me.”
A pause. “I’m fine for that not to happen to me.”
Galvin says he’s never refused a storyline. From the romances (”when Chris married Rachel and The Chills played at his wedding, that was possibly the greatest moment of Chris’s life) to the funerals; the selfie that led to “penis-gate” headlines and the musical numbers (he swears he did seven “really good” takes of Anchor Me but the sunset was perfect in the eighth - and worst) this is a show he says, where the budget means more words than visuals.
“It’s cheaper to have people talking about things, than actually showing them. Most of our scenes are people talking and so it’s more like theatre in that way.”
Like Shakespeare? “I wouldn’t dare say that! You can, but I can’t.”
Galvin famously auditioned for Shortland Street with a hangover. He competed against Marton Csokas, the actor who ultimately played Leonard Dodds before winning film and television roles around the world.
“You would definitely say he’s had a more successful career,” says Galvin. “And definitely as a young man, that’s what I aspired to. But having a daughter, and the fact that I can be in the same city and I don’t have to work weekends. It’s just fantastic, I couldn’t ask for anything better.”
Lily, now 17, is the child that changed Galvin’s mind.
“I always didn’t want kids. My wife at the time, Melissa [Dines] did. And thank god. You know, thank god I listened to her and not myself. She was right and I was wrong.”
He is not, currently, in a relationship (“I’m happy without - there are people like that”). And he is not, currently, chasing fame or fortune and, actually, he won’t talk about the latter. “Contractually can’t,” he says.
“I’m quite a calm person now. I certainly didn’t used to be. I was all buzzing around ‘I should be this, I should be that’. Now I’m ok to be whatever this is.”
Meditation helps, he says.
“I’m not very formal about it. Sometimes I do maybe 10 or 15 minutes, but if I’ve got a space of time, it could be 40 minutes or an hour.
“You’re just sitting and relaxing and exploring what happens when you’re not thinking about a whole bunch of shit . . . it’s just about shifting your awareness to your surroundings, and what’s happening inside you. Gently shifting awareness away from the continual narrative and thoughts.”
And then: “I’m so angry at myself for even talking about it! I really hate talking about it because I sound like such a . . .”
Why did he start meditating?
“To be . . . to overcome . . . just to be happier, you know, and less afraid. And able to deal with big emotions and big events. Just life. Just the normal human condition!”
When Shortland Street first broadcast, Galvin loathed the public interaction.
“I was pretty precious. People coming up and wanting photos . . . it didn’t take long to realise that’s a really good thing, and that I should be really grateful for that. And also that there’s no room for introversion.
“I used to think I was a shy person because that’s what I called myself. But if someone comes up to you and says ‘oh, can we have a photo’ and you’re not giving off a welcoming energy, you know, because you’re ‘shy’ - it just looks like you’re rude. What I learned, quickly, was that they need you to be an extrovert. You’re a bit of a miserable sod, if you can’t welcome that and be grateful for it.”
Galvin has no personal social media presence; a recent nomination for television personality of the year was, he says happily, a vote for the show rather than the actor. He perhaps agreed to this story pitch because it coincided with a rare external project.
Mannbannd (self-proclaimed undiscovered genius reforms boy band) is Galvin’s fourth play to make it to the professional theatre stage. Now in its final week at Palmerston North’s Centrepoint Theatre, the lead is played by Blair Strang (better known to Shorty fans as ambulance driver Rangi Heremaia - murdered by his mistress, 2001).
Galvin didn’t attend opening night.
“Opening nights are pretty horrendous when you’re the writer. Awful. Terrifying. It’s just excruciating. You feel every word and every laugh that isn’t there or every laugh that’s in the wrong place. Every cough. Every sigh.
“You wrote it. You made those people say those things. If people love it, that’s a lovely ego boost. But on opening nights, you don’t know that. And sometimes they don’t love it.”
Galvin says his ego used to be more fragile. Now?
“I would say it’s pretty healthy. I really try not to give it much thought. It’s such a waste of energy to be worrying about what people are thinking about you. It’s just such a dead end.”
Mannbannd by Michael Galvin, Centrepoint Theatre, Palmerston North, until December 16. Shortland Street cliffhanger screens 7pm, Thursday, December 21, TVNZ. Producer Oliver Driver says: “How do we top last year’s Christmas cliff, when we burnt the hospital to the ground? We sail right past and, for the first time, do a New Year’s Eve cliff, and trust us, this is one countdown you will not want to miss. Your favourite characters ring in the New Year in turmoil and tragedy, setting up a 2024 that will see friendships destroyed, hearts broken, the return of familiar faces and the arrival of a new bunch of characters . . . “
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and works as a senior reporter across its news and lifestyle sections.
New York Times: The importance of specialised care for fragile new mothers.