“You know,” actor Marianne Infante says, “Filipinos love their salty and sweet. That’s a good mix.”
I did not know that. Well, I knew salty and sweet was a good — nay, exceptional — mix thanks to the classic Chinese takeaway favourite of sweet and sour pork, but I did not specifically know about Filipinos’ love for the taste combination.
In fact, I don’t know too much about Filipino culture at all, my only exposure to it being one studious lad in my class back at secondary school.
I’m willing to bet this is not unusual in Aotearoa, despite our rapidly growing Filipino community. In the 2018 Census, over 70,000 people identified as Filipino, making up around 1.5 per cent of our population. Many work in healthcare. Almost 7 per cent of Aotearoa’s nurses are Filipino.
This is why Infante’s appearance on Shortland Street in 2021 was such a big deal. Her character, nurse Madonna Diaz, is the first representative from the Filipino community and the large group of people working in our hospitals. In many ways, Diaz is a lot of Kiwis’ first exposure and introduction to Filipino culture.
“It’s a huge honour, as well as, ‘about bloody time’. That’s the energy,” Infante says.
It’s also another first to be added to Infante’s long list of them. Her career in the arts has largely been about giving her culture a voice. She is the creative producer of the Proudly Asian Theatre Company, wrote New Zealand’s first Filipino theatre production, the award-winning Pinay, in 2019, and then, in 2021, penned our first Kapampangan short film, Mekeni, in 2021.
“I’m the first Filipino nurse to be on prime time in such a robust, long-term way,” Infante adds, noting the absence of this large slice of nurses in shows like Grey’s Anatomy or House. “I’m so stoked that Shortland Street is leading the way. I hope that this institution takes pride in that. It means a lot, not just for the Filipinos, but also for the nurses.”
Infante was born in Pampanga, northwest of Manila and widely accepted as the culinary capital of the Philippines. Her family came to New Zealand when she was 11, settling in Christchurch. She watched Shortland Street as a kid. Not because she was thoroughly engaged by the plotlines which, at that time, involved civil unions, car bombings and, perhaps prophetically, an outbreak of a deadly virus, but for another more grounded reason.
“I watched Shorty with my aunty for the first few years I moved here. I was interested in what New Zealand television was like. And also the harrowing experience of assimilating to the Kiwi accent and the Kiwi vernacular, like ‘sweet as’. Sweet as what?” she laughs. “I used Shortland Street as a vehicle to understand the New Zealand culture and context. And the speed of talking.”
She credits the show with fast-tracking her assimilation into New Zealand culture, although she qualifies that by saying, “You can take that in a negative or positive way.”
“It allowed me to practice my ear. To understand and enable myself to communicate with a New Zealand accent,” she says. “I was able to morph and find my sense of belonging. It allowed me to fit in, to be quite honest.”
Despite aiding her adjustment to her new home and her interest in the arts and performance, she never harboured ambitions to star in Shortland Street herself.
“It wasn’t a dream because I never saw myself on that show. I never saw my people reflected on the show,” she says. “It was a show where I always said, ‘I’m going to engage with the show the minute I feel like the stories I’m seeing, or the people I’m seeing on that show, I can relate to’, and I never really did.”
It was especially jarring as she has family working in the health system, and her parents had initially hoped she, too, would become a doctor or nurse. There were also her own experiences as a patient.
“If you go to Middlemore, any hospital, it’s like a sea of my family members. I remember being in hospital one time and I was nil by mouth. There was the smell of [Phillipine dish] adobo being heated up in the nurse’s station. It was the cruellest punishment,” she grins. “I could hear all the aunties talking, heard my language being spoken, the smell of my food wafting through the room. It felt like home.”
This responsibility of representation is something she takes incredibly seriously. Too seriously? Perhaps. But now that she has opened the door, the last thing she wants is for it to shut behind her.
“I definitely feel the weight of it because I’m the only one doing it in this capacity. I have no room to fail,” she says. “I want to leave the door open for other Filipino actors and stories to come through Shortland Street. And not just for Filipinos, but for us Asians who have been monolith-ised for so long. ‘Asian’ is not one demographic. As a brown Asian, my experiences as an Asian person are so vastly different to the experience of an East Asian or South Asian.”
She describes her role as Diaz as an “amazing opportunity to start a conversation”. One that’s about being seen.
“I never saw myself as an Asian until I moved to New Zealand. For me, I was just Marianne. But with the spaces I wanted to fill, and the constantly growing kōrero around diversity, then I became an Asian. Then Filipino. Then, as I went down the track, I was like, ‘I actually whakapapa to a very specific community in the Philippines’. I don’t represent the entirety of the Philippines. Nor should I. But because we are starting from having never done this before, you have to go broad. Once you’ve got the audience listening and engaged, then you go, this is what it’s like to be an everyday Filipino migrant. To be as unapologetically proud of where you come from and who you are as an Asian New Zealander.”
Away from the occasional murderous rampage or crazed behaviour of its characters, Shortland Street has always strived to hold a mirror up to life in New Zealand. While the makers would be the first to admit the journey is nowhere near complete, and never really will be, they have made great strides in diversity and inclusion over the years to reflect a more accurate representation of our culture, ideals and people on-screen.
Seeing Infante’s obvious passion and dedication causes an odd, Sliding Doors-style question to pop into my head. So I ask it.
Had the young Marianne seen a Flipino nurse on Shorty back when she was a kid, seen her culture, her food, her people and - essentially - herself on our television, would she have had the same intense drive and determination she has today, or would she have heeded her mother’s advice and gone into medicine?
After silently musing on it for a short while, she says, “I think yes, there’d be the same fire.”
“As a creative — outside of being a Filipino — it would have 100 per cent been there. But it definitely built my resilience and stamina as a maker. Even though I’m standing on the shoulders of so many other Bipoc [black, indigenous and other people of colour] makers, it led me to find my own way and establish myself within the world.”
Then she laughs and says, “I’m a Leo. I’m a born leader.”
That’s the positive spin. The flip side is that if another Filipino actor had established space in the industry, she wouldn’t have struggled so hard in audition rooms because all those barriers would have already been broken down.
“But do I think it would have been easier? Or that it would have been handed down to me? I don’t think so,” she says. “But it would have lessened the barriers of trying to make representation and emphasis on how we represent this side of New Zealand.”
Without straying into spoilers, Madonna Diaz is about to take a starring role in Shorty’s traditional Christmas cliffhanger. Infante can’t wait for it to air.
“I’m excited for people to see different definitions of beauty outside of the mainstream beauty that we think of,” she enthuses. “It really encompasses the beauty of a Filipino woman.”
A lot is happening in the storyline that Infante says has “significant” resonance for many cultural and social groups, “whether or not people want to look at it that deeply”, she adds.
“Marianne the storyteller is 100 per cent invested in it. Not just because we’ve been working hard to make Madonna who she is for the last three years, but because 11-year-old Marianne would have loved and revelled [in seeing] it,” she says. “Every time I think about that, I have a little tear of joy and an overwhelming feeling about what it would have been like for me growing up in New Zealand to see it. I get emotional when I think about it, because it’s never been seen, and to be the person to do that — it’s huge.”
“I can’t even put into words how important it is to finally take space in a way where you can be proud to be from two different worlds and to straddle both worlds. To be proud of all the hard work you’ve done and to feel like you belong. To finally be in that space on screen for everyone to see.”
Then, Marianne Infante wipes away some tears, the emotion of what she’s accomplished and what it means for her community, herself and her home hitting her all at once in that moment.
Then, looking me straight in the eye, she finishes her thought.
“And to say: This is who I am.”
Photo / Dean Purcell. Stylist / Courtney Joe. Hair and makeup / Claudia Rodrigues.
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