What would you do if you were walking along the beach one day and stumbled across half a billion dollars worth of the A-class drug methamphetamine sitting there on the sand?
In 2016, in the far north town of Ahipara - population 1230 - an old married couple found themselves in this very situation. The drugs may have been hidden better, but Ed, a fisherman, and his wife Heather, an aquarobics instructor, obliviously got themselves entangled in the middle of an international drug deal after a flashy group of out-of-towners asked for Ed’s help when chartering a boat.
This deal wasn’t a small-time marijuana trade run by the locals, either. This was half a billion dollars worth of the A-class drug methamphetamine being snuck in from China by an Australian gang. It was the big leagues. It involved real money, real criminals and real danger. Despite the grave potential risk, the couple stayed involved to aid the police in making one of Aotearoa’s biggest drug busts.
This remarkable true crime story has now been adapted into a six-part series called Far North. The series is a ripping yarn, made even more so on account of it being based on facts. Premiering tonight on Three, it stars local acting legends Robyn Malcolm as Heather and Temuera Morrison as Ed.
While there’s a lot to talk about, the first thing to ask is how two of our most loved actors would react if they were in Ed or Heather’s shoes and found a similar drug haul on the beach.
“I’d run away in the other direction as far as I possibly could and then call the cops,” Malcom says without hesitation. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it, because if you’re near that, you’re near something pretty dark.”
Morrison, on the other hand, isn’t so quick to commit himself to an answer. After a pause, he answers.
“I’ll be ringing my buddies. ‘Look, I’ve got hold of some stuff here. Can you move it? Keep me some.’”
A look of shock flashes over Malcolm’s face before a sly grin crosses Morrison’s face and they both crack up.
“I’m joking. I’d have a look at it first. Make sure it’s not icing sugar,” he says, acting out opening a bag and having a little taste.
“Another double-check,” he says, repeating his tasting motion, before he shakes his head and says, “This is no good. This is not washing powder…”
It’s a funny scene, a great performance and a good indication of the chemistry between the show’s two stars. They’re completely magnetic on-screen and off, and together make a terrific double act as they riff off each other or playfully mock each other whenever things get too serious.
Of course, they’ve known each other for a long time, first appearing together on Shortland Street way back in the ‘90s.
“We only had a brief moment on Shortland Street together, and I remember we only had a few little bits and pieces,” Morrison says. “But I always had a great, great respect for Robyn. She’s a powerhouse when it comes to acting. I always look to her to help me as well. Every day on set I’m going, ‘Robyn? Robyn? Am I doing okay here? Have you got any advice for me that I can [use to] make this better?’”
A playful hit on the arm from Malcolm sees him get momentarily serious.
“Robyn is brilliant. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing.”
In both real life and the show, Ed and Heather didn’t find the drugs sitting in the sand. Instead, it was a series of oddities that led them to realise what they’d become involved in.
“They were helping some people who came up from Auckland and said, ‘We need to take our brother’s ashes out to sea’. So they went, ‘Sure’,” Malcolm explains.
“They genuinely liked these guys and developed a relationship with them. The little suspicions that they had started to creep up on them. There’s that lovely thing that we have as Kiwis where you automatically think the best of somebody. I can relate to this. When you meet someone who’s behaving slightly oddly, I don’t go ‘criminal’. You try to think logically; ‘What’s up with them?’. By the time they got to a point where they’ve got a very angry man speaking in Mandarin on a satellite phone on the beach, that’s when they started to go, ‘What is this?’. But it was a slow burn for them.”
Neither were aware of the news story before getting sent the script, with Morrison joking, “I must have been asleep that year”, and Malcolm saying all she remembered of the real-life case was that some locals found some meth on Ninety Mile Beach.
“But David White, who wrote and directed this, saw the news article, and immediately his writer’s brain went, ‘There’s more to this than that’,” Malcolm says. “He jumped in his car, drove up and found the people that we’re playing and just knocked on their door, sat down and had a cup of tea.”
She says the couple took David in and essentially made him part of their family as he worked on adapting their outrageous story for close to seven years. He was so committed to it that he ended up living there while writing. As well as the script, he also wrote a book on the case, which is out now.
The real-life Ed and Heather were involved in the production, present on-set and acting as what Malcolm calls, “on-the-spot consultants”, there whenever she or Morrisson needed them.
“They kept it real. They kept it honest. Their presence reminded us constantly of [the fact that] even though this is really funny, the story is serious too,” she explains. “What they were actually doing, what they were unaware of and what they were up against. It was only after they realised what they were dealing with that they got nervous and got scared, because it’s a dangerous world, the international drug world.
“But you’ve got these people who didn’t know that they were suddenly part of it. It’s this comedy of errors around the fact that things started to go wrong. The people they were helping out just kept ballsing it up more and more and more. Which is why it’s so funny and why it’s such a compelling watch.”
She says when she got sent the script, she couldn’t put it down.
“It’s this litany of stuff that you just don’t believe could have genuinely happened to real people. But it did,” she says. “It’s got that lovely journey of an action thriller, but like with so many dramas in New Zealand, there’s this kind of gorgeous, dark, dark, dark comedy which sits underneath it. It’s a real - it’s a page-turner, but it’s got some laughs in it.”
Morrison, on the other hand, was more worried about the practicalities.
“I remember reading some of the scenes just thinking, ‘How are we gonna film this?’” he says, before chuckling. “We actually had a golf cart they mounted the camera on.”
“We shot most of this on this thing that they’d just drive around. I enjoyed the story. I enjoyed the yarn and I thought, ‘Oh, this is quite funny too.’”
The pair spent seven weeks filming on location up north. At first, the locals were a little suspicious of all the people down on the beach every day (“Because it looks like we’re doing nothing,” Morrison laughs), but eventually, the production became accepted and then part of the community. So much so that the show had a special premiere showing in Kaitāia last Friday.
“It’s a nice part of the world. The people are very friendly. A number of mornings, I’d wake up [and] there’d be seafood outside my door,” Morrison smiles. “The locals would just drop it off. ‘Have a feed, Temuera! I’ve left you some kina, left you some mussels, left you some snapper.’”
Then he laughs and says, “Of course, I’d go around and tell everyone I’ve been out fishing this morning and give some of it out.”
Far North premiers tonight on Three and ThreeNow tonight.
People aged 60-plus accounted for 55% of all house fire deaths over the past 5 years.