Tauranga stay-at-home dad offers film role to PM's partner, Clarke Gayford

A Tauranga father of six is hoping the Prime Minister's partner, Clarke Gayford, will play a part in his new film based on stay-at-home dads like himself.

Hallam Woolfrey, 47, founded a support group for other stay-at-home dads in 2016 which inspired him to write a comedy drama film and he hoped Gayford would play a cameo role.

"It is interesting that he is the Prime Minister's [partner] and he will also be a stay-at-home dad which is the hardest job in the world," Woolfrey said.

"I think it would be harder than running the country to be honest ... So I thought I needed to give him a break somehow."

The film will be based on both real and made-up male characters who deal with daily issues they face as stay-at-home dads and is set during a sand-sculpting competition on the Mount Main Beach.

Woolfrey is offering Gayford the part of a "surf dad" in the short feature film after the Prime Minister announced her pregnancy earlier this month.

"I think I would have him as a walk-on, maybe having him as a surf dad and he asks the stay-at-home dad group to look after the kids while he goes for a surf," Woolfrey said.

A father to six children, aged 18, 16, 13, 11 and 4-year-old twins, Woolfrey said he understood the challenges of being a stay-at-home dad and supporting his wife who was the main wage earner.

With a background in script writing, Woolfrey decided to turn his experiences into a screenplay which he entered in the New Zealand Film Commission/New Zealand Writers' Guild seed funding competition last year.

Woolfrey said the screenplay received good feedback with one judge saying it had "great commercial potential" and he was being mentored by Bay of Plenty Film.

The best of the Bay's locations and local music will be showcased in the film, which Woolfrey hopes will be picked up by local musician Tiki Taane and directed by Taika Waititi.

At first the film was going to be serious, but as he continued to write the film became "hysterical".

Characters included a dad of twins who suffered from depression, an older dad who often got mistaken for a grandfather, a gay dad who wears a G-string, an alcoholic dad, a mentoring father-figure and a "happy-go-lucky" Korean dad.

Woolfrey had even included a role for New Zealand First's Winston Peters to offer fatherly advice and has based a character on Bay of Plenty Times' photographer George Novak.

"It is because of the stay-at-home dad group I met those characters and I couldn't believe they were from all walks of life. Under any other circumstances we wouldn't have met," Woolfrey said.

Now Woolfrey was looking to find the right men to play the parts of his characters and hoped Gayford would accept his offer if the film went to production.

Anton Steel, of BOP Film, said he was supportive of Woolfrey's writing and what he wanted to create.

"We really want to foster local stories to be told here in the Bay and to mentor local writers so hopefully we can see more made here."

Gayford was also contacted for comment.

Hallam Woolfrey's advice for the Clarke Gayford:

- Women are set up totally different to men. Because women carry the babies they share a special bond.
- Don't think like your mum. A lot of people when they become a stay-at-home dad try to do it the way their mother did it.
- Don't clean up constantly. Kids are destined to make a mess, they love mess. Let it go, and let it go easy.
- Give them plenty of exercise.
- Take them to the beach. They tend to stick with you then and not keep running away. They like to build sandcastles and dig holes with you.