The Convert left its mark on Guy Pearce. No, it wasn’t just from the ache of the horse riding he did in Lee Tamahori’s film about an English preacher caught between fellow settlers and two warring iwi in the Musket Wars of 1830s Aotearoa. And it wasn’t the bruising sustained in the scenes of internecine violence as his character, Thomas Munro, a former British soldier turned lay preacher, attempts to play peacemaker.
No. As he pulls up his sleeves on the Zoom call, the Australian actor shows the two permanent tattoos he had done by the film’s tā moko designer Tyler-Jade Whatarangi. One is a mountain reflected in a lake, designed to represent Monte, his 7-year-old son with his partner, Dutch actor Carice Van Houten. He became a father for the first time at 50.
The other tattoo is a feather motif. It represents his late, Auckland-born father, Stuart, who was serving in the RAF in the UK when he met Pearce’s schoolteacher mother, Anne. Pearce and his sister Tracy were born in England before the family resettled in Geelong a few years later, where, he says, his father was happier being nearer his New Zealand family.
Pearce senior, who had been a squadron leader stationed in Singapore, became a test pilot. He died on a flight in 1976 while testing a notoriously non-airworthy Australian plane, the GAF Nomad. Pearce’s mother died last year.
“On some level, I feel kind of more connected to New Zealand than I do to Australia,” Pearce says of his transtasman ties.
![Transtasman ties: Stuart Pearce, Guy's father, married schoolteacher Anne in England, while serving in the RAF. Photo / Supplied](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/IFVIBTDXKVH7PGEPVM627QUL7A.jpg?auth=9b3a5d7a8a1bd9077a1da756e0d41fdb61a327aa84a0f2000c597878a8d735ae&width=16&height=22&quality=70&smart=true)
Well, to coin a phrase: everybody needs good neighbours …
“Absolutely. That is the phrase,” he laughs about the inevitable reference to his beginnings as a star on the Aussie soap and his late-career return to Ramsay St for the show’s 2022 finale and its 2023 streaming reboot.
Yes, he still has relations here but sadly, he says, the day he arrived in NZ to make The Convert in September 2022 was the day the last of his father’s many sisters died.
“She wasn’t an aunty that I was very close with, but it set me off on what was a very emotional and sort of profound journey. My father was very present in my mind as I was making this film.”
Pearce headed to Hollywood after his breakthrough role as Felicia in 1994′s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. There, between making the likes of L.A. Confidential, Memento and some lesser flicks, he met Kiwi director Tamahori, who was there after the success of Once Were Warriors.
They talked, got on well, said they must work together some day. Finally, nearly three decades later and after a few projects that didn’t come to fruition, they have.
![Making connections: Guy Pearce and Lee Tamahori first talked of working together about 30 years ago. Photo / Kirsty Griffin](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/AMIWLME4FFE7ZJ5VKPGIULPPAI.jpg?auth=dc9344b3f1625586583e7e4fadc48ac985264a3657d830185be25aea44af5641&width=16&height=11&quality=70&smart=true)
Tamahori said he had Pearce in mind when he was writing The Convert (read more below). Pearce read it and said yes but then couldn’t do it because of other commitments, including his role in the Kate Winslet HBO crime drama Mare of Easttown. But along came Covid, various scheduling delays and the screen industry stimulus package, the Premium Production Fund, and Pearce was on his way.
Why him? “I don’t know what it was … I’m sure there’s a sensitivity to the character that he thought perhaps I could bring. He wanted a man who, even as a lay preacher, was probably really only using the cloth as a means of survival almost.
“It’s as much a story about his own journey as it is the journey of Pākehā in New Zealand, so I’m not sure exactly what Lee saw in me but I think we’ve just always kind of understood each other and had a similar sensibility as far as performance and human behaviour goes.”
Plus, Pearce could ride a horse. He learned to ride as a kid and spent a couple of seasons in the saddle for a television series of The Man from Snowy River after his four years on Neighbours.
His character Munro has brought his white steed to New Zealand and upon arrival, he and the horse dive in and head for the beach. “I’m very comfortable on a horse but if you haven’t ridden a long time and they say, ‘Can you gallop up and down this beach a few times,’ I can guarantee you can’t walk very well the next day, or the day after that. I was paying the price.”
White guy on a white horse arrives to preach to the white settlers but also trying to negotiate peace between warring iwi. Is he a white saviour?
“The character, to some degree, thinks he can be a bit of a saviour. So that’s one of his flaws … but in the film, that’s all there just to indicate that he has no chance whatsoever of being any kind of saviour – that, in fact, it’s himself that he’s got to save. There’s obviously a few moments where I’m compelled to rush forward and say, ‘Enough of this violence!’ But very quickly, he’s sort of shut up.”
Munro does end up sporting one of Whatarangi’s designs in the film and it’s not the first time one of his characters has had to sport some markings. In Memento, the 2000 breakthrough feature by Christopher Nolan, Pearce played the amnesiac lead Leonard Shelby whose body was covered in tattooed aides-mémoires. “I had 26 tattoos on that film and that was quite a story, wasn’t it?”
Yes, it was. But it was The Convert that left him with his own mementoes.
![Iwi at war: Antonio te Maioha as Maianui, whose daughter is saved by Munro. Photo / Kirsty Griffin](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/J5PIE7FUDJEDPLX3WKNZ6JWPZ4.jpg?auth=19cbc0764c81273026cc9f46d899ddc1b4fb26d9e04aff279fabee9abf6dbc37&width=16&height=11&quality=70&smart=true)
Tinge of Te Rauparaha
If Pearce found The Convert a chance to embrace his Kiwi ancestry, the film certainly suggests a full-immersion Aotearoa experience.
The Lee Tamahori movie that debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last year is only the third local feature he’s directed, after Once Were Warriors in 1994 and 2016′s Mahana, a family melodrama based on Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies by Witi Ihimaera.
There are literary connections to The Convert. The movie began with producer Robin Scholes buying the rights to Wulf, Hamish Clayton’s 2011 novel about an English trader encountering Te Rauparaha. Brad Haami, a cultural adviser and an associate producer on the production, suggested a fictional setting and characters would be better than something specific to the Ngāti Toa warlord. From there, the script evolved with a story by Michael Bennett, and additional writing by Greg McGee.
When Scholes sent him the work-in-progress, Tamahori didn’t warm to it. “Originally, Munro, who’s our lead character, was really a religious zealot, which was not an attractive proposition for me, and I didn’t like him as a character,” he says in the film’s production notes. “I wouldn’t go and see a film about a guy like that.”
Instead, the director delved into the histories of prominent missionaries such as Henry Williams and Samuel Marsden. Williams had served time in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars before becoming a man of the cloth. That idea of a priest with a military past he’s possibly trying to escape informed Pearce’s character.
Meanwhile, Haami was working on the creation of a fictional whakapapa for each of the Māori characters. “I’ve always felt that you couldn’t have authentic Māori storytelling without creating the backstory. And a lot of films don’t like backstory but as Māori, we are a backstory people. So, it’s important because the whakapapa, the histories of these people, build the motives for the people in the film to act in certain ways.”
One of the film’s warring rangatira, the ruthless Akatarewa, played by Lawrence Makoare, has echoes of Te Rauparaha, as well as Ngāpuhi chiefs of the Musket Wars period such as Hongi Hika and Pomare.
Tamahori and Australian screenwriter Shane Danielsen, who was brought in by the film’s Australian co-producers, share the final screenplay credit. As well as Pearce, the film’s other lead Pākehā role is played by Australian Jacqueline McKenzie.
It’s not Tamahori’s first film about the period. Early in his career, he was an assistant director on Geoff Murphy’s Utu. In that film, the Pākehā vicar had an even rougher time with the locals than Pearce’s lay preacher.
The Convert opens in cinemas on March 14.