Talk about calm after Bollywood

Martin Henderson prefers the small-budget atmosphere of 'Torque' to the bluster of Bollywood. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

When Martin Henderson came home from Los Angeles last year to promote Torque, it was clear Shortland Street's boyish heart-throb had turned into a biker action star. He had the Hollywood swagger down-pat, he was flirty and engaging and he spoke with an American accent.

Today, the Kiwi actor still looks a bit like a biker - that's what you get when you've been playing a one-legged, bong-smoking drug dealer for three months - but something has changed.

"Whenever I come home I get this sense of calm," he says, sounding more like the serious, artistic type than a Hollywood hero. "It's a familiarity, a feeling like I really belong."

Unlike The Ring, the horror flick that gave him an international profile last year, Torque was a box-office flop and led Henderson on a search for meatier, more challenging roles.

The latest is in Little Fish, the story of a reformed heroin junkie (Cate Blanchett), which Henderson has finished filming in Sydney.

Now that Henderson has acquired an Aussie accent, he's back in New Zealand for Christmas and New Year "to shake it off", he laughs.

The first challenge came in Bride & Prejudice, a camp and colourful collision between a Bollywood musical Grease and the Jane Austen classic of a similar name, directed by Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham). Henderson plays Will Darcy, an uptight LA hotelier who goes to India for a wedding and he falls for one of the beautiful guests, Lalita (Aishwarya Rai). Fellow New Zealander Daniel Gillies (Spiderman-2) plays his rival, Wickham, a free-spirited but dodgy backpacker who turns up and wins Lalita's affections.

"I'm fascinated by things that are different or inventive and I felt ... all the scripts I was reading at the time - and I was reading a lot of scripts - were somehow derivative of films I'd seen before," Henderson says, "and this just had no other previous incarnation except maybe a Bollywood movie."

He decided he didn't want to play the staunch, masculine Bollywood hero, choosing instead to portray him as the old-fashioned character Austen would have intended. But so far, reviews haven't been favourable, with some critics slating his "wooden" performance.

"Originally, Miramax were a bit confused or worried that I wasn't playing the American smooth, charming leading man," he says. "I think they were a bit upset at first. But I'd spoken at length with Gurinder about it. He starts off more reserved and at the beginning of the film he's almost like an anti-hero, he's dislikeable. But that was kind of the point of the character to have that journey."

Shot in three continents, Bride & Prejudice made sure of that. Unlike Darcy, who is initially dismissive of Indian culture, Henderson took an eye-opening expedition through the poverty-stricken areas of Kerala and Jaipur when filming wrapped.

"I felt that the intangible things in life - the spiritual aspect of life and the relationships we have - are more prevalent in India. You feel that people are more in touch with that. In the West we distract ourselves from those things because we're pursuing wealth and success and cars and more Western ideals of success."

Coming home to his nice pad in LA, the mecca of materialism, was weird, says Henderson, despite the fact that he lives in a peaceful part of the city, in the hills where you're more likely to find deer, squirrels and birds than people and bright lights.

He says that he's now relieved Torque wasn't the blockbuster it was anticipated to be. "I don't want to have a career based on those kind of movies. I had a lot of fun doing it and I'm grateful for the experience and it made some money, from a studio point of view, it was good to headline a movie like that. But I'm kind of glad it didn't pigeonhole me into that kind of career.

"There's something about an American film or a Hollywood film. There's so much at stake that you feel like a lot of the energy goes into thinking about how the film could be."

Working on the smaller-budget Sydney film, on the other hand, was his best experience. "We had a month's rehearsal. That just doesn't happen on these American films, and everyone was willing to give that time. I felt there was a real commitment to the process and making films good on a creative, artistic level. If it does well that's great - but it just felt like a more relaxed way to work too.

"It's enough to have some good commercial success and that's fantastic. But I also want to start defining myself as an actor and find roles that are maybe a little more challenging.

"As fun as it is to do the big, flashy commercial things, I think it leaves me a little creatively unsatisfied."

And his next move?

"Maybe get projects funded here so I can remain a part of the New Zealand industry," he says. "I really love where I'm from and I don't ever want to lose that."

On Screen

* Who: Martin Henderson

* What: Bride & Prejudice, the Bollywood musical, released in NZ in May