Kerry Fox the kooky chameleon

Kerry Fox is an accomplished swearer and puller of faces. Picture / Richard Robinson

The day we see Kerry Fox she has all the trappings of the visiting film star. She has the suite in SkyCity Grand Hotel; the on-loan dress-up clothes from Zambesi. She's just done the obligatory photo shoot for a magazine. She still, somehow, fails to look like a visiting film star. She says, with more enjoyment than is seemly, that her 9-month-old boy has "just been up here today, vomiting on the carpet". She gestures, grinning, at the carpet near my feet.

So much for preparing a series of serious questions about acting. I thought I'd need them. In interviews she comes across as intellectual and terribly serious about her art. And as a bit of a strop. Well, she is smart and she is serious about acting - although not in that deadly earnest way that gives acting, and actors, a bad name. "It's not brain surgery," she says.

You don't so much interview her as watch the performance of a contortionist. She wriggles and flings her arms about. She leaps to her feet to go over to the kitchen to demonstrate how to properly act at cleaning a bench. She talks in long, complicated sentences, delivered in sprints. She is an accomplished swearer and and puller of faces. All of which is in contrast to the demeanour of many actors who demonstrate the range of a corpse during interviews.

"I'm very, very direct ... Just because I demand a huge amount of hard work I'm kind of called difficult. So if you're a lazy f***er of course you're going to find it very, very, very difficult to spend any time with me."

"Difficult," she says, is the ultimate put-down for an actor. "It means being a nasty wanker; indulgent. You know, I don't think I'm like that, ever."

What she is, is funny. At the end of the interview, director Colin McColl, who is in the room next door, comes in and says, "What was all that laughing?" She did most of it. She has a terrific repertoire which includes honks, snorts and mock-evil chuckles. She laughs so much she's in danger of losing her mascara. This, like pointing out recently vomited-on carpet, is an effective way of dealing with, as she calls it, putting her evil eye on me, "the press". It would, you feel, be a shame to interrupt what amounts to a private performance. And it is too entertaining.

When we arrive she's wearing a frilly shirt which she changes for a spangly number. "Very whorish," says McColl who will - and good luck to him - be directing Fox in the Auckland Theatre Company production The Blonde, The Brunette and The Vengeful Redhead. McColl and Fox worked together on An Angel at My Table and she says: "I can very much be myself with him." It is a one-woman show in which Fox will play seven characters. "I know. [Journalists] have said, 'How can you possibly play all those characters? I don't know. What if I can't?"

This is acting at being anxious. She does at least seven versions of a visiting film star in the space of an hour. Chameleon, let's remember, is a complimentary word when used to describe an actor.

Fox says she has wanted to work in New Zealand again for some time but projects "fall apart or don't happen or someone else gets the f***ing part".

The play begins in August but Fox has just finished filming a horror flick, The Ferryman, directed by Chris Graham, whose first feature film was Sione's Wedding. It is "a bloody, gory, screamy thing". She plays a tough Aussie sheila, which she says - and you believe her - she can do very well. "Like the blonde [hair]? It's my Australian slapper hair. I love it." She did a lot of her own improvising, "like 'Oh, Jeez, if you blokes were any sexier I'd wet myself'. And other imaginative lines like that. It's going to be deeply humiliating."

She would, you think, be hard to humiliate. She is seemingly free of that strange mix of vanity and insecurity being an actor incubates. She is easy to like. For one thing she makes very expensive clothes look like clothes - in other words, they don't look like they do on models. She doesn't pretend she's in control of, well, anything really that isn't acting.

When her cellphone rings she dashes over, pokes at it haphazardly and says despairingly, "I don't know how to turn it off!" She had to read some books for a telly book show and she read them on the film set, "lying on the ground ... when I was horizontal", between takes. This was because her schedule told her "it was time to read the bloody thing".

She is telling a story, punctuated with great hiccupping laughs, about improvising on The Ferryman set. "You just have to keep on and on and on" and "and making jokes about another blonde character, "saying really bitchy things ... 'Oh, typical f***ing blondes'. Then the whole crew could see it dawn on me that I was blonde too! And I'd completely forgotten and it was so clear on my face and they [the crew] just about died laughing."

She is just about dying laughing telling this story, but "it gets worse than that. They had this stunt driver playing me ... His name was Clint and he had big biceps ... and the wig obviously and people kept getting shocked by how strong the resemblance was.

"It was weirdly surreal and then for 10 days afterwards ... every time I passed the mirror all I saw was Clint. It was horrific, really distressing."

Fox is good at improvising, and going on and on and on. This, too, is a good interview ploy. It means we don't get to that film for a bit - which is not to say she's surly or coy talking about it. I think she's just a bit bored by the whole thing. She is the actor who was in a film called Intimacy in which she gave another actor a blow job. She doesn't for a moment regret having done the film. "Oh, no. God, no, it was the best piece of work I've ever done. I never felt frightened of doing it. I felt completely in command of my craft and that was a fantastic space to be in."

Still, she took a lot of what she calls "all that schloop, schlup, schlop" from the media. Her partner, journalist Alex Linklater, wrote a piece about jealousy, but they are still together and have two children, which says enough about their having got through it.

I put it to her that in New Zealand she'll always be the actor who did An Angel at My Table but that in the UK she'll always be the actor who did Intimacy. And that there had been much speculation that the latter had ruined her career. "Oh. Really? No one's ever said it quite like that before! Well, maybe it has ruined my career."

I thought she'd appreciate the blunt approach because she admires the "bulldozing brashness" of Australians and, chameleon that she is, adopted it. She says one of the effects of having done Intimacy was that "some people who aren't very adventurous would be fairly frightened to work with me".

Goodness, does she mean - to put this more politely than I did to Fox - that they're scared she might jump them? She does the Aussie slapper laugh but gives a serious answer about the frustrations of UK theatre, and "not being allowed to really act, not being able to go the extreme that I feel I'm capable of". Which is, really, just a different interpretation of what frightening someone might mean.

She has said that "all the films I've been in have failed for one reason or another". Now she says "they haven't made as much money as such and such". And "everyone does a dog now and again, eh?"

Marketing herself is not her greatest skill. "Well, that comes back to what's failure and what's success. And you know the really, really, big shame for me? Don't write this in a way that's going to be taken the wrong way," she says, now playing being Very Strict and Bossy. "Oh God. Intimacy opened the week after 9/11. So, you know, nobody in America saw it."

The last thing she says is how lovely Auckland is and how she loves that the sky changes all the time. I say, "Oh? You're being nice about New Zealand now, are you?" "When hadn't I been nice about New Zealand?" When she said in an interview that a lot of New Zealand could be dreary compared to London. "That was for the British press. Ha, ha." The last sound on my tape is Fox's cackling.

Very difficult to spend time with? No, she's a delight. Unless you were expecting to meet a visiting film star.