Kiwi actress Melanie Lynskey has hit out at New Zealand's "eye-rolling attitude" to the arts.
The New Plymouth-born television star - who won worldwide acclaim by playing Rose on hit US sitcom Two and a Half Men - says Kiwis who achieved success overseas were subject to ridicule, including in their hometowns.
In an interview with the Guardian, New Plymouth-born Lynskey recounted an uncomfortable encounter she had with staff at a Taranaki fish and chip shop she had visited on a trip home.
"We were getting dinner for everyone so I paid with a credit card, and they were very surly," she said.
"I said, 'Do you need me to sign for anything?' because I hadn't signed the receipt.
"The man behind the counter said, 'No, who do you think you are'?
"We don't want your autograph'."
She said the encounter was an example of the "eye-rolling attitude" people in the arts had to contend with, adding some New Zealanders struggled to properly acknowledge accomplishment.
"You're kind of made fun of, but then there's also this ownership," she said.
Lynskey is starring on HBO's new comedy, Togetherness.
On top of her small-screen success, Lynskey has a list of film credits to her name, including her debut movie performance alongside Kate Winslet in Sir Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures and more recently Happy Christmas, We'll Never Have Paris and Goodbye To All That.
Lynskey's comments echo remarks made by Man Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton, who claimed a tall poppy syndrome existed within the New Zealand arts community.
The Luminaries
author won the illustrious international prize - awarded annually to the best original novel written in English - but she failed to win the overall 2014 New Zealand Post Book of the Year award.
Eleanor Catton.
That prize went to Jill Trevalyan for
Peter McLeavy: The life and Times of a New Zealand Art Dealer
.
Catton did, however, win the fiction award, along with $10,000.
"There was this kind of thing that now you've won this prize from overseas, we're not going to celebrate it here. We're going to give the award to somebody else," Catton told an audience at the Jaipur Literary Festival, held in India in January.
Catton also said she was uncomfortable with the way the Man Booker was seen as an award won by New Zealand.
"It betrays an attitude towards individual achievement which is very uncomfortable.
"It has to belong to everybody or the country really doesn't want to know about it."
