By MICHELE HEWITSON
The black 1944 Ford Jailbar truck pulls into the carpark at the front of the hotel. The guy behind the wheel is wearing a flashy suit and a shiny mauve tie.
He's got two silver earrings in his left ear; one in his right. He's chewing gum. People stare.
A man in the lobby says, "Look. It's Jay."
As in, look it's Jay Laga'aia, the local telly star who works six months of the year here as the lead in Street Legal. The starers might not know that he spends the other six months in Australia where he's really quite a celebrity. He does Play School for ABC, hosts a talent quest and a show which sets up other celebrities with elaborate practical jokes. He's been in Star Wars II so there's a plastic toy out there in Star Wars fanland with his face on it. In Thursday's Herald a television review called his Street Legal character, David Silesi, "a love magnet".
When he arrives at the hotel, I don't think, look, there's Jay. I think, and say, "Goodness, you've come in character".
"Nah," he says, "I'm going to see my solicitor."
He's here to have some fun.
Which makes me think "goodness", for the second time. Because the sad truth is that with telly stars, the going can be more rugged than the favoured terrain for a souped-up Jailbar. Too often they come with a minder, a mouth full of monosyllabic utterances about the art of being an act person and an air of wanting directions to the nearest escape route.
Laga'aia does not need a minder. He says sensible things, such as: "My job is simply to tell stories. Whether it be to 3-year-olds who are going on a bear hunt, or to 30-year-olds about the trials and tribulations of a scorned lover."
He must be a publicist's dream. The only downside to an interview with Laga'aia is that he tells such good stories that it's hard to get a question in edgewise. In other words, he is a very accomplished, and astute, interviewee.
He is also a good mimic and does a naughty, pitch-perfect impersonation of director Raymond Hawthorne.
Laga'aia exudes confidence, but he's not cocky. If he swaggers a bit on the short walk from truck to hotel lobby, that's because David Silesi, the lawyer with lashings of bad-boy-with-big-heart charm, has been known to swagger.
Because, despite that solicitor crack, Laga'aia is - sort of - in character.
The odd thing about this is that Street Legal finished shooting its third episode in May - that's the one now screening on TV Two on Thursday nights - and Laga'aia is still driving around in the truck.
He gets to drive it when the show's not in production. This is not quite a perk because "It's a simple car. If it's cold you wind up the window. If it's hot you wind the window down."
There is another downside: "People come up beside and me and go 'Hey, there's the truck. Maybe it's ... ooh, it's Jay ... Beep, beep, beep'." He thinks that's hilarious.
The really odd thing about Laga'aia is that most characters in popular telly shows go out of their way to emphasise that, as they sigh, the character is actually a character in a television fiction. It Is Not Me, they are forced to spell out in the supermarket check-out queue as they are harangued for the character's latest infidelity.
In driving that truck, in turning up to an interview wearing a Silesi suit - he calls it "my full Mormon outfit" - Laga'aia gives every appearance of a willingness to blur the boundaries.
"We wanted people to understand that this character was three-dimensional. That this person was alive and was in the community."
Laga'aia knows his character well, possibly too well. He tells me a story about the scene where David is invited to the wedding of his true love, Joni (Katherine Kennard), who dumped him. Infidelity may have played a part. Laga'aia argued "tooth and nail with the producers" about David attending the wedding. No bloke, says Laga'aia, is going to show for what amounts to a public admission that the other bloke's better in bed.
"They said, 'He's got to go there so that people can see he's bigger than that'." Laga'aia said: "Trust me, he isn't."
You're taking this personally, I tell him. He looks at me with almost believable disbelief: "Well, you have to."
So he did. He sulked on set; kicked around a soccer ball; refused to look at the wedding dress. Kennard said to him "Jay, it's a [character ... ]" Laga'aia said, "Yeah, I know that but still ... "
He doesn't call this method acting. He calls it investing the character with much of his own character: the frustrated rugby player, the guy who will back himself in the face of the most illogical decision.
O NCE UPON a time the idea of acting for a living must have seemed not just illogical, but impossible. The third in a working-class family of eight, Laga'aia left Mangere College at 17 with two School C subjects - human biology and Maori. "I was the shining light of my mother's eye - not."
The Samoan actor likes to joke that, "I was going to be a Maori doctor but Tem [Morrison] beat me to it." He was working on a scheme in South Auckland teaching young things music when he auditioned for Heroes, a TV series about a band of young things. But it was when he got the part in a Mercury production of Sweet Charity that he fell in love with acting. He was about to turn 21; his first son had just been born (at 38, he now has six children).
He didn't know anything about "etiquette" and arrived for the first rehearsal with the baby, "so frightened I was like a sponge". Once he saw the costumes and the set "I was there in the spangdangled ballroom and just went, 'Oh my God. Whatever this is, I want some of this'."
He has a simple philosophy about "some of this". Acting, and any reflected celebrity, is he says, about "continually running your own race. You don't run your own race by seeing how fast your competition's run."
He's as proud of Play School as he is of anything. "It's back to grass roots and kids. That fine line between condescending and story-telling." Which is about as fine a description of good acting as you'll hear from anyone.
Story time with the engaging Laga'aia over, we wander out to the hotel carpark to get a picture of him - and the truck. An Australian tourist asks if she can take a picture - of the truck. Sure, he says. Then she takes another look and says: "Oh, I'm sorry. Are you famous?"
Earlier he gave me a postcard of him in Play School, and he makes me take some Street Legal bumper stickers.
To the tourist's question about whether he's famous, he replies: "Not at all, I'm in PR."
By MICHELE HEWITSON
The black 1944 Ford Jailbar truck pulls into the carpark at the front of the hotel. The guy behind the wheel is wearing a flashy suit and a shiny mauve tie.
He's got two silver earrings in his left ear; one in his right. He's chewing gum. People stare.
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