Rhys in our time: Interview with Rhys Darby

The world was introduced to him as scene-stealing “band manager” Murray in Flight Of The Conchords but, as I introduce myself to New Zealand stand-up, actor and writer Rhys Darby, I feel I should now be calling him “Legs 11”. I’ve just watched my first episode of Darby’s new mockumentary series Short Poppies, which finds him playing eight oddball characters as their small-town lives in New Zealand are ostensibly documented by a TV journalist. First up is delusional lifeguard Terry Pole, an improbable “sexy legs” competition winner who’s eager to insure his “moneymakers”. It must be said, there is some terrific legwork on display.

“Aw, thank you,” says Darby in that early familiar voice. “I’ve been wanting to get them out there for years, get them out there among the people!”

Darby has previously likened his pins to Sean Connery’s during his Bond days, so we can only assume when he heard about the opportunity to write and star in his own TV project, his first thought was that it would make a terrific platform for them?

“Hehe, exactly. Let’s get the legs out there first, then we’ll see what happens after that!”

Shock horror, that wasn’t actually the initial idea. Instead, Darby hoped to create a vehicle that would showcase his versatility as a comic actor (he’s been taking on various guises during his stand-up for years).

“Once I finished …Conchords, I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my own show. I knew that I wanted to portray different characters and I had a couple already in my head. The ranger character, the UFOlogist, a whale watcher… So I thought, 'let’s just come up with a few more’. That took a while. I wanted to make sure they were real, they weren’t just slapdash.”

The premise itself is a play on a New Zealand programme called Country Calendar.

“Every country probably has a show where you’ve got a reporter who spends a day in the life of ordinary people. It’s quite boring, but for some reason we all just sit home and watch it. Compelling, rural reality! I wanted to make a mock version of that.”

The title, Short Poppies, is an inversion of “tall poppy syndrome”, something Darby has experienced in New Zealand.

“It’s a foreign notion, particularly to America,” he starts before saying that the likes of Canada and Ireland, countries with overpowering neighbours, will likely be au fait with it. “They know that if you’re sticking your neck out, you’re going to get your head cut off sometimes. I had a little bit of that when I went home. Not too much, not in a very bad way, but enough for me to go,’c’mon guys, I’m not the weird one here! We’re all weird!’ I just wanted to create a show that proved that… even though it was me playing all the characters!”

He certainly gave himself plenty to do as a performer – was there ever a point during filming where he wondered what he’d gotten himself into?

“I did think of that towards the end. I would just get into the groove with one character, I’d spend a week filming all the scenes for him or her, and the next week I would come in and have to dress up as someone completely different. I’d think, ‘oh, I miss that person I was being!’

“All the characters end up in the final episode together, and that was one hell of a thing to shoot… But then it’s been a year and a half and I’ve already started thinking of more characters and I’m thinking maybe I should do another season. It’s a bit like pregnancy; having a child. You forget about how much pain it is and you have another one.”

Which character was he saddest to see go? “Oddly, it would probably be Mary Leadbetter, the mid-’60s woman. I don’t know whether it’s to do with my mum or something. I found when I was dressed as an older lady, I got a lot of respect on set. She could bicker and complain as much as she wanted and people would go, ‘you’re right there, Mary’. I seemed to get my cups of tea quicker. It was just… weird.”

So something he’ll take into his private life, then?

“I think I will! Put it this way, I’ve got high heels on now! But the guy that I most relate to is a local lawyer and muscle car enthusiast. He’s just a real Kiwi joker. He’s loosely based on my brother, so he’s always ‘on’, having a good laugh with his mates.”

Outside inspiration aside, there’s a good deal of himself in each comic creation. When you watch the otherwise hapless Terry Pole give a semi-inspirational talk on positivity, for example, it seems a very ‘Rhys Darby’ outlook.

“Yeah, it is. In fact, my wife said that Terry Pole was the closest to me. Which I couldn’t believe, I was flabbergasted with that. He’s the hardest to do, because he’s kind of this douchebag!”

The last time Darby spoke to Hot Press, he spoke fondly of Philip Seymour Hoffman, having starred alongside the late actor in the 2009 Richard Curtis flick The Boat That Rocked.

Did the news of his passing come as a shock?

“It was a total shock because I knew nothing of his drug past. Or, as it was, present. Having hung out with the guy and his kids on set when we were filming that, I didn’t know anything. I know that he had separated from his partner or something, but I just didn’t see it. It just goes to show that there’s no profile for that. It is what it is and it happens in private. A total shock. This was a guy who was at the top of his game, the top of his art. And yet, struggled with addiction and lost the battle. Blown away by it really. Very sad, very sad.”

We don’t want to end on a sad note so…

“Let’s finish with a song!” Darby interjects, ridding himself of the quiver in his voice. We could go out on a musical number (not great for print), or we could talk about the unlikely rise of another old colleague of his, Chris O’Dowd, to Hollywood heartthrob status.

“I was more annoyed than anything that it was him rather than me! Cos I know he took one role that I let go of when I had my second son…. I’m thinking, ‘no, my God, that could have been me! It could have been me in Bridesmaids!’ Because he kept his accent and everything. No, I thought it was fantastic actually. Good on him. You must be pretty proud of him over there? You’re not tall poppy-ing him are you?”

Not in these pages at least. Anyway, Darby can take heart. When the Hollywood studio bigwigs sees those legs in Short Poppies, those rom-com roles will soon be flooding his way. Onward and upwards.

“Well exactly. We can only go up from here!”

Short Poppies is available now on Netflix