JJ Fong tells Greg Bruce about the highs and lows of show business.
Everything had been going so well for JJ Fong. At the end of March, she’d appeared in a leading role in the Netflix series Wellmania, which quickly became a global top 10 hit for the streaming service, then she was pursued by high-powered Hollywood management and all of a sudden she was getting two high-quality international auditions a week.
Then, at the start of May, most of the television and movie writers in America went on strike, and just as her career was ready to take off, there were no more shows to audition for. Opportunities to work have now dried up almost entirely.
It might sound like terrible timing for someone who just had their big break, but that’s not the way she sees it. She says that while she’d like to “crack the States”, like almost every other actor on earth, she’s already living her dream.
She grew up in Pukekohe, where her father was a market gardener. She was always a bit artsy and, to borrow her self-description, also quite nerdy.
“I’d say I was quite a goody two shoes and a little bit wallflowery,” she says
In her last year or two at school, Fong developed more confidence, but still, she says: “I definitely have always been quite nerdy. I had glasses, bad acne – just really not cool at all.”
When she finished school, she was tossing up between studying fine arts and dance.
Fong chose dance, she says, because she knew she would always be able to paint when she was older but she wouldn’t always be young enough to dance.
She spent two years studying commercial dance at Wellington Performing Arts Centre, then briefly moved to Melbourne, before deciding she needed to learn singing and acting, returning to Wellington for another year to study musical theatre.
After that, she moved back to Auckland, where she began teaching at her old dance school in Pukekohe. She also got work appearing in music videos and appearing in some local theatre productions. After being cast as the lead in a show called The Secret of Dongting Lake, she began thinking acting was something she’d like to do more of.
She started getting work in television commercials, which were well paid, but not enough to make a career out of. Thinking she needed to develop her acting skills, she applied for an intensive one-year course with Auckland acting school The Actors’ Program, but she wasn’t accepted.
“I was 25. I was having, like, a quarter-life crisis. I didn’t really know what I was going to do and getting a bit older as a dancer as well. So I was like, what am I going to do? And then my agent was like, ‘There’s this role. Do you want to audition?’”
The audition was for the character of Alice Lee, a newly created leading role on local hit show Go Girls, and, much to her surprise, she got it. Soon after, The Actors’ Program got back in touch to say someone had pulled out of the course and to ask if she would like to take their place.
“Actually,” she told them, “I’ve landed a lead role in a New Zealand television show.”
Instead of paying thousands of dollars to learn to act, she says, she got paid to learn on the job: “I didn’t know anything,” she says now. “It was so bad. I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ I had no idea. There were five of us in the core cast. I hadn’t done any screen stuff before, and I was just like, ‘What the hell? I don’t have any idea what I’m doing.’”
Fong learned fast though. After Go Girls, she landed a long-running role in another hit New Zealand series, Step Dave, and since then she has accumulated a long list of credits in productions both local and international.
Not content just to star in other people’s stuff, she teamed up with Ally Xue, Perlina Lau and Roseanne Liang and began making web series Flat3, which became an underground hit and spawned a production company of the same name, through which the quartet have created a stream of increasingly popular content. The second season of Flat3′s latest and most successful show, dystopian comedy-drama Creamerie is hitting screens this month, on TVNZ, and also in the US on Hulu.
Creamerie is not just their biggest hit so far but also the show that got Fong noticed by the casting director of Wellmania.
And that’s how someone who never planned to be an actor found herself in 2023 starring in one of the most popular shows on Netflix.
She’s never tried out for another acting course.
The life of an actor is all about the elation of being cast and the crushing rejection of not being cast. She has now experienced both sides too many times to count. The audition process can be long and arduous and emotionally involving.
For the role of Amy Kwan in Wellmania, for instance, she was contacted by the casting director who had seen her in Creamerie. She was asked to send in an audition tape, which she did, but she didn’t hear anything back for seven or eight weeks and assumed she’d missed out.
Eventually, they asked her back to do another audition known as a “chemistry read”, with the show’s lead character Celeste Barber. Establishing chemistry usually requires physical proximity but because this was the middle of Auckland’s Covid lockdown and Barber was in Australia, the chemistry had to be established over Zoom.
“I was just like, ‘I’m definitely not getting this role,’” Fong says now. “Why are they even considering doing this via Zoom? It’s just not going to work.”
Again, she didn’t hear anything for weeks, then, when her agent finally called in late December, it was to tell her she’d been asked to do another chemistry read in early January, again over Zoom.
By the time of that second chemistry read, Fong estimates she had spent around four months either auditioning for, or waiting to hear back about, the role of Amy Kwan.
She had been in plenty of other situations where she has been through multiple rounds of auditions only to miss out, including for Netflix. She describes the waiting as awful. But she also says she likes “the thrill of rejection”.
“I love landing the jobs. But then it’s like, then I have to do the job, and that’s the part that I’m like, ‘Shit!’ But I love the challenge of the possibility that I could get this thing.”
Anyway, in the case of Wellmania, she did get the thing.
The uncertainty of the acting life, especially in this country, and the space between jobs, means there is plenty of time between gigs. As an actor, it’s what you do with that time that matters.
As someone who self-describes as an organised person and a go-getter, it’s fair to assume Fong might find such an unstructured life challenging. This, she says, might be one of the reasons why she, Xue, Lau and Liang created Flat3 Productions, and why they continue to create shows together.
“I think that kind of keeps me sane on that side. I mean, there is still no guarantee either with creating your own work. That’s still incredibly difficult, and you still have to get past lots of hurdles, like funding and commissioners and all this other stuff. But I have more control over that.”
In spite of the US writers’ strike and the drying up of the big roles she had been auditioning for, life goes on.
Earlier this year she had a guest role in upcoming Australian series Gold Diggers. More importantly, she got married to her long-time partner, cinematographer Marty Smith.
While she’d love to star in a big international production, she knows there is much more to life than starring in big international productions.
If it happens, she says, “I’ll be like, cool, I’ve ticked that box.
“But it just never ends,” she says. “Even if I did land a US role, I’d be like: ‘Now what?’”
Series two of Creamerie is available on July 14 on TVNZ+ with episodes 1 & 2 (back-to-back) airing on TVNZ 2 at 10pm on July 14.
Styling/ Annabel Dickson. Clothing/ Blue dress from Wynn Hamlyn, earrings by Jasmin Sparrow. Pink top and trousers from Ruby, boots from Skellerup, earrings from Meadowlark. Hair and makeup / Elise Anderson