Tangata Pai: Shavaughn Ruakere takes on ‘terrifying’ first major te reo Māori TV role

Hosting live TV as a teenager, leaving a mark on Shortland Street fans, and yes, dating the former first man of New Zealand, Shavaughn Ruakere has seen and done it all. Well, almost. As she tells Bridget Jones, her next role is one that terrified her and forced the actor to look deep into her past.

Before you ask, no, Shavaughn Ruakere hasn’t read Dame Jacinda Ardern’s book.

Yes, she knows she’s in there. No, she didn’t know beforehand that she, the ex-partner of Ardern’s husband Clarke Gayford, would be mentioned by name. In true Kiwi fashion, she only found out when her sister told her a mate had read it. And when you ask her about it? Well, she gets very, sweetly shy about the whole thing, not so much forming words about the experience, more embarrassed noises and a lot of arm waving and head-hiding.

Fine by me. Who she has dated is easily the least interesting thing she has to talk about, anyway.

Happy? Right, moving swiftly on then…

Whether you know her as a peppy 18-year-old hosting What Now in the ’90s or as Roimata, one of Shortland Street’s most beloved nurses, or as host of horror dating show FBoy Island, or maybe for her impressive turn (and box step and heal lead and open break) on Dancing With The Stars, Ruakere really has done it all during her 30 years on screens. Now, she’s trying something else. And it was maybe the most daunting challenge so far.

“This was a healthy amount of terrifying for me, taking on this role, and even for people learning te reo, no matter what stage you might be at, there’s a feeling of being whakama, being shy, and worrying about getting it wrong. And I had those feelings.”

“This was a healthy amount of terrifying for me, taking on this role," says Ruakere.

Ruakere is sitting at home in Auckland’s Eastern suburbs, rugged up in a cosy, colourful jumper that she twists around her body as she explains the weight of her new eight-part TV series, Tangata Pai. It’s a first, not for New Zealand, but for broadcaster Three - its first drama series with 30% te reo Māori spoken by the cast, which includes Ruakere, Nicola Kāwana, Jayden Daniels, Ariāna Osborne and Yoson An.

The series is inherently political, set against a land occupation in Taranaki, and a looming terrorist attack within the community. Ruakere (Te Atiawa, Taranaki) plays a mum, a nurse and a woman just struggling to make it through the single hour the series is set over (each episode focuses on the same eight-minute period for the five main characters).

It was all new for the 47-year-old. Sure, she’s played a nurse before (and her mum was one too), and she is helping raise her partner’s three children, but speaking te reo on screen was not something she was particularly comfortable with.

“I think there’s a lot of shame around not knowing the language, and I feel that myself,” she says.

“I remember at our read-through, and meeting some of the cast for the first time. I asked ‘how’s your reo?’ and they would say, ‘not good, not good’. Then I’d hear them speak and they were way better than me! But I totally get it - even people who are really good still have those feelings, being terrified to get it wrong, or their pronunciation’s off. It’s stuff people put on themselves a lot, that fear of judgment.

“But why shouldn’t we celebrate this language that is uniquely ours?”

Ruakere studied te reo for a year at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa a while back.

“I bloody well wish I had continued because that would be incredibly helpful for me taking on this role,” she laughs. One day, maybe, she’d like to commit to a full-immersion course.

Ruakere in Three's new bi-lingual drama Tanagata Pai.

Both that experience, and the premise of Tangata Pai means she’s spent time reflecting on her childhood, her parents and the opportunities they didn’t have growing up.

“I think about my dad, he started to learn [te reo] in his 70s.

“I’m one of four kids, and it wasn’t part of our life at all. My mum is Pākehā and dad’s Māori, and we would go to the marae, but we would feel a bit out of place there. We didn’t understand the tikanga, had cousins who could speak te reo and just seemed to know so much more than we did, so we would feel shy and whakamā about that.”

Filming Tanagata Pai in Taranaki sparked lots of those memories. Memories of zooming around the black sand of Fitzroy Beach, splashing around with boogie boards and her big sister. Ruakere was raised in the small town of Ōpunake, before the whānau moved to “the big smoke” New Plymouth when she was 8. She says in true hometown style, some of her extended family even made it into the series: “It’s like, spot the cuzzie”.

"We didn’t understand the tikanga, had cousins who could speak te reo and just seemed to know so much more than we did, so we would feel shy and whakamā about that.”

There are also harder memories she came face-to-face with during filming, and one in particular that she worked into the script. It will be innocuous to most viewers, but for Ruakere, it was a way to honour her late father, who died in Taranaki Base Hospital, which is the hospital referenced in the series.

“There was one scene where I had to do a bit of medical action, putting in a line. As we were doing it, working with this lovely background talent fulla, who was telling me his life story as we tried to rehearse, I thought, ‘I needed to fill the air and I wonder if I can adlib a few lines?’.

“I made up some lines about ‘hello Mr Wilson. Great to see you back again’ and then I nodded towards our pretend window in our set, and said, ‘Oh, I see you’ve got a view of the maunga there’. And that’s what I would remember from all of those times dad was in and out of the hospital, if you had a room with a view of the mountain we would always comment on that. That, for me, was a special little moment.”

That sense of self and a willingness to try something new only comes from a lifetime of wins and losses. Or maybe it was instilled in Ruakere early on. Her very first time on a film set was the infamous 2005 local production River Queen, where as a young actor, the experience of bringing a story to life maybe didn’t look like most film sets.

Ruakere had one day on set, a featured role but no lines. Director Vincent Ward had left the project late in the piece (he was rehired weeks later to complete the film).

She remembers she had one scene alongside Cliff Curtis and Temuera Morrison.

“And it was like they were directing,” she says. “I remember Tem and Cliff talking to each other, ‘oh bro, what if you say that and I say this?’ ‘Yeah bro’. And I was like, wow, is this acting? It seemed like they were making it up as they went!”

Shavaughn Ruakere and her partner Enrique on Dancing With the Stars NZ 2018.

Maybe they were, or maybe it was necessity. Either way, Ruakere quickly learnt to survive in the industry, you can only control so much - and you have to be able to roll with the punches. It’s made her resilient, but also realistic about what it means to “make it”.

“It’s bloody hard. I’ll go through really long periods without any mahi on that front. I’m incredibly lucky I have a supportive partner who looks after us - he supports me in my dreams. And I’ve gone through lots of periods of my adult life when I was single, and you are dirt broke.

“I was in LA for almost two years, and I remember two occasions when I checked how much money I had, and both times I had 62 cents in my account.”

The obvious question is why on earth would you keep going? But Ruakere says she’s stuck around out of love. Love of being on set, love for the crews she works with and love of the feeling of creating a “little whānau for however long you are together telling this story”.

And it’s those stories, the uniquely New Zealand ones, that interest her the most today. Because, while once upon a time, she might have had hopes of Hollywood calling, these days success looks different, more homely.

“Now that I’ve got my family, I don’t have the big dreams of wanting to go overseas - I wouldn’t say no to that stuff, but the thought of being here and working on really cool stories that feel like you are doing good in the world by making them.

“I like being at home. That’s getting older… When I was younger, I think there was more of that idea that if ‘Hollywood rang tomorrow I’d be on the next plane out!’ and now that’s not what you’re thinking about. We’ve got our whanau and our cat and our dog and life changes.”

- Tangata Pai starts on Three and ThreeNow on Tuesday.

Bridget Jones joined the New Zealand Herald in 2025. She has been a lifestyle and entertainment journalist and editor for more than 15 years.