What does it feel like to be stuck on the other side of the world when your home country suffers a major tragedy? Hollywood stars Anna Paquin and Martin Henderson talk to Greg Dixon about being Kiwis overseas and why they're lending their support to tomorrow's Christchurch telethon.
The accents aren't giving them away. On the phone from Los Angeles, their prolonged vowels, convoluted Yankee syntax and warm and positive vibes sound like pure Californian sunshine must feel. But if Anna Paquin and Martin Henderson don't sound very much like us these days, these Shaky Isles of ours are very much in their thoughts.
The two New Zealand actors, talking by speaker phone in a conference room on the True Blood lot in West Hollywood, are testimony that Christchurch's murderous February earthquake and its myriad minor and major aftershocks have been felt on the far side of the Pacific.
And they have shaken Paquin and Henderson into action. The pair have lent their support to the Rise Up Christchurch Te Kotahitanga telethon, which screens on Maori TV from 9am tomorrow.
The event, in partnership with the Rise Up Christchurch Facebook network, isn't purely a fundraiser. It will apparently feature stories of heroism and hardship from Christchurch during and since the quake, as well as covering the ongoing fundraising efforts on behalf of the city.
Local supporters include usual suspects such as Richie McCaw, Dan Carter, Pippa Wetzell and Mike McRobert, as well as Rachel Hunter, back in the country for the event. Dairy company Fonterra has also written a cheque for $500,000 towards the broadcast's production costs.
And ex-pats Paquin and Henderson have answered the call to provide a little starlight in the post-earthquake gloom.
I tease them by suggesting that, when things go wrong, they're New Zealanders-on-call.
"We're circling the wagons," Paquin says, then laughs. Henderson opts for a more earnest, "If it was a mate of yours in trouble, you would ... Your first question should be 'how can I help?' I think it's kind of that simple really".
Henderson and Paquin, along with actress Melanie Lynskey, singer-songwriter Greg Johnson and former Shortland Streeter Chris Hobbs will been seen in pre-recorded and live crosses from LA during the telethon.
Henderson says people in LA are "really supporting this once they know about it. And that's just a really beautiful thing to see. I think I want to stress that to the people of Christchurch and to people in New Zealand: that people outside of New Zealand, they do care. And we're trying to raise a bit of awareness, because when what happened in Japan went down a lot of the media focus in the world went elsewhere. It seems the people of Christchurch are feeling a little abandoned."
Their phones began chirping soon after the rumbling ceased. As they are both what used to be called jet-setters, neither Paquin nor Henderson were at home in LA when the deluge of text messages began.
"I was at an airport," says Paquin, "and one of my best friends texted me to make sure my family was okay. That was the first I heard [about Christchurch]. I called home immediately to make sure that everyone was accounted for and thankfully everyone I know was okay. I've been following it through the news since."
Meanwhile Henderson, who was working in Hawaii, remembers he was in bed when he received the first of a flurry of texts from friends in the United States and around the world. "Most of them didn't know where Christchurch was or geographically where I was from. They were just making sure my family was all right. I hadn't seen it on the news either." He quickly went on the internet and "realised what had happened".
"All my family is in Auckland so I didn't need to worry about them particularly. But I do have friends with family [in Christchurch], and fortunately they were all okay too."
Technology connects, but the physical distance with "home" remains of course. Both Paquin, 28, and Henderson, 36, have long since, as their accents disclose, made their homes where they have had the best chance of pursuing what actors like to call "the work".
"If you make some specific product, you go to the town where they make it the most if you want to get a lot of jobs," Paquin says. "[LA] is the factory town for movies and television. I kind of gradually, then suddenly, ended up in America. I ended up spending so little time at home that eventually it made more sense to have my base out here."
LA has seen the sense in the move too. Paquin has arguably become the most successful New Zealand actor in Hollywood right now - Russell Crowe (and his ambiguous New Zealandness), aside. Since winning the Oscar for best supporting actress in 1994 for her pre-teen turn in The Piano, Paquin has worked constantly, and with some extremely talented people. She's done a blockbuster franchise - the three X-Men films - appeared in indie hits like 2000's Almost Famous and 2005's terrific The Squid And The Whale, and has worked for directors Steven Spielberg and Spike Lee.
However, being cast as Sookie Stackhouse in HBO's hit series True Blood, the vampire drama from Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under), has lifted Paquin to another level of celebrity altogether. She's appeared (naked and covered in blood, no less) on the cover Rolling Stone, has done the late-night talkshows, had a couple of appearances in Maxim magazine's "Hot 100" list and has become tabloid fodder after marrying her True Blood co-star, Englishman Stephen Moyer. And she's had a fistful of Emmy and Golden Globe nominations too.
By comparison, Henderson's career has been steady rather than stellar. After getting his start on Shortland Street in the early 1990s, he made the move to Hollywood via Australia, where he reportedly met and befriended a young Heath Ledger on the set of Home and Away. From the early 2000s, he landed roles in several big-budget US films including director John Woo's critically panned war movie Windtalkers and a successful Hollywood remake of the cult Japanese horror movie The Ring. Perhaps his most critically applauded big-screen work during the last decade has been at this end of the world: in Australian crime drama Little Fish (with Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving and Sam Neill), and last year's wartime docu-drama Home By Christmas, from New Zealand director Gaylene Preston.
Henderson reappeared on our TV screens this year in Off The Map, an American medical drama set in the jungles of South America but filmed in Hawaii. The show won mixed reviews but reasonable ratings, though it was unknown at the time writing whether it would go to a second series.
The short version of all that is that Paquin and Henderson have been very busy not being New Zealanders for rather a long time - and you rather suspect that we know more of them than they do of us.
The ties that bind must inevitably slacken for ex-pats. It is also inevitable that a disaster like Christchurch reveals to them how connected or disconnected they are with home. "It does make you feel like you're very far away," Paquin says, though she, like Henderson, still has family here and returns now and then to see them.
"I think when you do live away, obviously you're disconnected, your life is centred around where you live and your relationships and your work," Henderson says. "But when something like this does happen to a place that you're from, it does remind you of how inextricably connected you remain to your birthplace. I consider New Zealand home. Although my whole entire adult life has been away, it is so dear to my heart and I think [the telethon] was just sort of a calling for me when the producers asked me whether I would be involved and support it in some way."
The question of how leaving one's home country changes - for better or for worse - one's view of it is an interesting one. Writer Katherine Mansfield, for example, was, at times, less than complimentary about New Zealand in her writing once she'd got the hell out. Much more recently, in 2003, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa raised ire locally when, in of all places an Australian newspaper, she criticised Maori for welfare dependency.
This is, of course, poor form. New Zealanders may no longer ask - defensively and 30 seconds after they've landed - what visitors think of the place, but we're still notoriously sensitive to criticism. So if Paquin and Henderson have any views on the lousy weather or the (alleged) great Kiwi knocking machine, they're polite enough not to say.
Still, you do wonder what the country means to them - family aside - now that they've got green cards and all.
"It's a big question," Henderson says, "and I don't even know if I have all the answers because, to be honest, my family is there. It's where I grew up, it's where I developed deep connections with the land and culturally it influenced the way I look at myself and the world. I think those things are so deeply ingrained. So my personality and my outlook has been so shaped by that and that is kind of constant. Frankly, it's a lovely thing to carry with you out to wherever else your work or life takes you."
They both believe their New Zealand upbringing - with all that is supposed to imply about being easygoing and unpretentious - has helped them enormously. "It's a huge advantage," Paquin says. "It's hard to take a lot of this stuff [celebrity] seriously."
It is always interesting to ask ex-pats what it is that makes them homesick - not for what does, but for what doesn't. Both, say they miss family and friends, with Henderson adding "rugby, the nature, the beaches ... pineapple lumps".
But if we, the people, don't make the list, we are, they say, incredibly nice to them when they're home - whether or not they're being on-call New Zealanders for a good cause.
"Sometimes I'm a little bit surprised that people recognise me as quickly as they do," Paquin says.
"I think it's quite funny to contemplate 'well, how distinctive do I really look? You took a three-second glance at me'."
She issues an embarrassed giggle.
"But everyone's always really nice and it's always 'welcome home' when I go through Customs as opposed to here. I have a green card but they always give me the third degree every time I come back into the city limits."
"Ditto," says Henderson. "I'm quite delighted by how supportive Kiwis are. It's nice to feel you are supported."
I'm sure Christchurch feels the same.
* The Rise Up Christchurch Te Kotahitanga telethon will be broadcast live from Auckland's Trust Stadium in Henderson, Te Papa in Wellington and the CBS Arena in Christchurch for 12 hours from 9am tomorrow, and will screen on Maori TV.
