KEY POINTS:
When you are sharing scenes with a star this big, you're going to get burnt. Cliff Curtis did, sort of, in his latest film. His character Searle is so starstruck he nearly gets a face peel.
That scene-stealing star? The sun. In Sunshine, Searle - when he's not playing psychologist to the highly strung crew of spaceship Icarus II - spends a lot of his time looking out of the vessel's heavily tinted window contemplating the fierce giant at the centre of our solar system.
The Icarus II is on its way to the sun to bomb it back into life, trying to save the Earth of 2057 from a long cold death.
Yes, the sun isn't meant to die for another 5 billion years and as for nuking it - wouldn't your weapon of mass re-ignition melt before it got close enough?
Yeah well, if there's one thing that working on Sunshine has done for Curtis, it's improved his grasp of astrophysics ...
"We are playing with the notion right now of something called dark matter," he says on the phone from Rotorua.
"In 60 or 70 years there are projections we could know what this actual thing is and contain it. And once you send this dark matter into this environment it would act as a catalyst and create a fusion and a fission in the sun's atmosphere which would prolong its life.
"Also, the projected life of the sun is 5 billion years but it is possible for a sun to get a cold or cancer and for its natural life to be thrown off balance and to speed up to go supernova before its calculated natural life. Just as humans can die at an early age, so can our star."
Searle's solar fixation might explain why the ethnically versatile Maori actor is the most tanned member of the international crew. Searle is American. He's also a Mr Spock-like brainbox among a mixed-race crew of astronauts and scientists.
Though Curtis is not exactly boldly going where no New Zealand actor has gone before. True, he's no Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison's Star Wars bounty hunter) but Sam Neill had a similar role in space-horror Event Horizon.
One of the things Curtis liked about Sunshine was showing how 21st-century travel might be - not that much faster than 20th-century space travel and with the feeling that any Earth-launched mission beyond the moon has a high possibility of being a one-way trip.
"That's exactly what we were trying to capture. Space travel has been treated as fantasy, it's not being treated as science any more. We were revisiting an age where space travel was a scientific process. It wasn't a fantasy. There's no aliens and there's no laser guns and all the science around the spaceship is about prolonging human life for long-haul space travel."
It seems after picking up a regular Hollywood pay cheque playing drug dealers, terrorists and gangsters, Curtis is being cast in roles requiring him to be a wisdom-exuding good guy.
That's not only in the cerebral sci-fi of Sunshine but in his other upcoming roles. In the fourth Die Hard flick, Live Free or Die Hard, Curtis plays the presumably very smart head of cyber defence for the FBI.
And in prehistoric epic 10,000BC he's playing a "skinny brown dread-locked Obi Wan Kenobi dude but without special powers" who becomes the mentor to the film's young mammoth hunter.
Yep, Uncle Bully goes woolly: "I'm looking forward to it. It could be the worst thing I have ever done but that is not always a bad thing."
But a switch to good guys has been a conscious move for Curtis. "Just before Whale Rider I decided I can't play any more gangsters or drug dealers or terrorists for a while, and Sunshine was one of the first ones to give me the opportunity. Since then I've stayed consistent to that.
"I've crossed to the other side and it's been working quite well, I think.
"You see really good actors who have languished [playing baddies]. They get stuck - like Gary Oldman; what a brilliant actor - but you think jeez there's a lot more to that guy than just playing the grotesque."
These days Curtis is a producer too and, with his cousin Ainsely Gardiner, has been busy with Eagle Vs Shark, the feature debut by Taika Waititi, which had its debut at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and is due out here in a few months.
Curtis has Lord of the Rings producer Barrie Osborne to thank for diversifying his film career. He encountered the American on Easter Island epic Rapa Nui - actor-turned-producer Kevin Costner's forgettable attempt at an Apocalypto.
"We became mates. He was the first the guy to say, 'Hey you're a bright young fella' - I was an extra on the film pretty much - 'Have you ever thought about producing?"'
The plan was for Curtis to be the creative side of the partnership and Osborne the number-cruncher aiming at small, low-budget features. But Osborne got somewhat distracted by films with more zeroes attached, like Godzilla, The Matrix, and the LOTR trilogy. Meanwhile, Curtis' career also took off.
Waititi originally approached Gardiner, who produced his first Oscar-nominated Two Cars, One Night, to produce his second, Tama Tu. Curtis signed on too. Now they've delivered on the director's first feature, which Curtis has been following around the world on its festival run. Producing sounds like a details and deadline-driven kind of job. And don't all actors really want to direct?
"Yeah, and all directors want to act and all producers want to act and direct. But I've got enough going on as an actor. I'm not doing a Billy Bob Thornton. I'm not going, 'What I really need is a role so I can be taken seriously as an actor'. That's what he did."
It's also a way for Curtis to put something back into local film without being in front of the camera. As well as roles in hits like The Piano, Once Were Warriors and Whale Rider, Curtis has been involved in some unfortunate New Zealand films over the years, like Chicken and Spooked.
Not that he necessarily regrets the misfires. He just wants his involvement in films here to be on his own terms.
"I get asked to do a lot of different things which is difficult because of scheduling.
"But also you often get invited into a situation where you don't know what the parameters are and so it feels much better to be contributing in a way where I am much more involved in the overall process rather than in a token way so you are not just being trotted out as some minor celebrity. I don't believe I've got quite the face for that kind of thing. I don't think that is what I have got to offer."
He, Gardiner and the prodigiously creative Waititi are already talking about their next feature.
"We've just got to keep him making films or he'll be off starting a clothes label or something." He laughs.
Yes, it seems as the young director enjoys his own time in the sun, Curtis will he happy basking in any reflected glory.
LOWDOWN
Who: Cliff Curtis
Born: Rotorua, July 27, 1968
Key roles: The Piano (1993), Desperate Remedies (1993), Once Were Warriors (1994), Rapa Nui (1994), Chicken (1996), Six Days Seven Nights (1998), Three Kings (1999), Bring out the Dead (1999), The Insider (1999), Jubilee (2000), Blow (2001), Training Day (2001), Collateral Damage (2002), Whale Rider (2002), Runaway Jury (2003), Spooked (2004), River Queen (2005), The Fountain (2006)
Trivia: Driving to location on the River Queen shoot in 2004, he crashed into a house in Otaki while distracted by a text message. The accident is mentioned almost every time the media reports on cellphone use in cars. Curtis came out in favour of a ban.
Latest: Sunshine opens at cinemas next Thursday.
