Temuera Morrison

The tats, the haircut, the bulked-up body, the brutality ... Temuera Morrison tells MICHELE HEWITSON why, once again, he'll be Jake.

It takes almost an hour to paint on the markings of the urban warrior: the chain-mail gauntlet, the rough-hewn hearts framing the skin-deep promise of everlasting love, the scarred brow.When it's done, Temuera Morrison hauls himself out of the chair in the makeup trailer, stretches, and puts on the stance of the truly staunch.He glances in the mirror, grins widely. Looking good.

"Look," he says, "there's Jake Heke. He's all in the tattoos and the haircut."

We've seen this particular metamorphosis of Morrison before. But the Jake of this follow-up to Once Were Warriors, entitled What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? ("Should be called Jake's Last Stand," jokes Morrison) is a slightly diminished hard man. "Whatever this journey is," says Morrison, "it's not a Warriors journey. It's one of the dilemmas we have with this film.

"It's an interesting thing, to achieve a Jake who's a fairly internal kind of guy."

Suggest, though, that Morrison doesn't look quite as ... well, gym-honed for the role this time and he's instantly mock-miffed.

"Don't I look bulked up? M-a-a-a-n, I've been training for the last three months and what's this? Well, I'm sitting pretty close to what I was before, I'm just not as ... puffy."

It's not a bad performance of outrage from a man who is wearing a bib and being shaved, pampered and powdered by two young women.But then, as the charismatic, violent Jake Heke he did outrage on the grand scale: lashing out at anything that got in the way of his booze-blurred, self-created cell of existence.

Getting inside Jake's head has been easier this time, Morrison thinks. "By the end of Warriors I'd sort of locked the character in, so there is an element of, 'Okay, I've just got to get him back.'"

Not, you understand, that he was "jumping and leaping with joy when I heard about this sequel - that was the last thing I was doing. Especially when I read the first draft. I was going, `Holy hell, are we making the same story here or are you guys making something else?'"

It takes a bit of meandering navigation to discover what it took to persuade Morrison to take on Jake again five years after Warriors.

It's not that he avoids questions. He simply seems to enjoy conversation carried out as a sort of dance where he changes the steps frequently, to keep himself amused as much as to entertain the audience.

And calling up the Jake of Warriors past doesn't evoke entirely happy memories. Last time Morrison couldn't get leave from playing his Shortland Street character, Dr Ropata, until the weekend before shooting started.

It didn't help that he arrived on set looking every inch the dapper doctor, complete with curly locks. Morrison remembers the director and producer huddled over cellphones making flustered calls to the casting director.

"Boy, were they sweating. They were nervous, I can tell you. Then they cut the hair and Lee Tamahori went, 'There he is!'"

And is again.

There are, too, the inevitable expectations involved in recreating a character who literally pummelled his way into the consciousness of the film-going public.

"You're right, man, the expectations are up there, that's the scary part. But what are they going to say in the end? `Well, it wasn't as good as Warriors.' And I'm expecting that - I can live with that."

He's working, and that's the main thing, as it has been since he won a role in Other Halves in 1984.

"Way back then I thought, `This is a bloody good job. They give you plenty of money, give you lunch, give you clothes to wear to stand around and show off all day - that sounds like a job for me.'"

He did have to ask himself of the job in hand: "Do you really want to go back?"

Still, the timing was good, once Ian Mune came on board as director he "really got excited," he likes working in New Zealand and, as he candidly admits, in contrast to "what I've been doing lately it was something a bit solid and meaty."

Warriors gave him the introduction to Hollywood, although Morrison wouldn't go as far as to say that he's actually got more than a big toe in the door.Remind him that as far back as 1988 he had cast his eyes to those alluring hills - "these quotes come back to haunt you like a politician. What did I promise the people about that?" - but worried that "there are a million Chicanos over there who look like me."

He hoots at this example of his 10-year-old clairvoyance. "That's right, Jesus, that's right too."

Notwithstanding that glut of guys who look a little like him, Morrison eventually got the Tem Goes to Hollywood Show on the road. He found himself an agent - acquired in rather haphazard fashion through a visiting American journalist, met after an interview with the then Governor-General, Dame Cath Tizard, fell through.

"He asked at the hotel if there was anyone else famous in New Zealand and found me. He told me he knew an agent and that if I gave him some publicity stuff he'd take it back with him."

A combination of the "stuff" and the success of Warriors has got him roles. Okay, maybe they're not quite parts that Tinseltown's A-list would be panting to land, but they have provided this "working actor" with decent pay cheques, a hell of a lot of fun - and endless dinner party anecdotes.

He worked with Pamela Anderson in Barb Wire.

"She was sweet, I couldn't get over how sweet. She had a bit of a problem at the time, I think, sometimes she didn't show up for work. But when she did bother to turn up, it was good."

Not that it seemed to matter too much.

"I've never been on a film where they had so many doubles. One day they had six Pammies on set."

Only one Marlon Brando though, who he met on the set of the quite bonkers remake of The Island of Dr Moreau. Brando - who Morrison had watched "over and over again" in A Street Car Named Desire and On the Waterfront in preparation for Warriors - invited him back to his trailer for a bit of a chat. So there he was, relates Morrison, making "intelligent conversation" with a screen legend when he suddenly remembered that he was still in costume as a half-man, half-dog slave.

And late last year he found himself in South Africa shooting The Hangman's Daughter, which is set, he discovered on the first day of shooting, in Mexico in 1913.

"They asked, `Where's your Mexican accent?' I said, `What Mexican accent? Where does it say that?' They showed me the script and there it was, the first two words: Mexico, 1913.

"I'm not very good at this accent business and I started to think I sounded like Billy T. James. So I said, `Maybe I'll just talk in a husky voice [the demo he offers makes him sound like a Mexican Brando] and that'll hide my New Zealand accent.'"

He hasn't seen the film yet and thinks "it might be one of those films that goes straight to video. I hope it's not because of my accent."

He's the master of the self-deprecating yarns, is Morrison. Which is probably as good a way as any of deflecting any attempt to engage him in discussion about the deep and meaningful side of either acting or the Morrison within. And a much more entertaining way of passing the time with a complete stranger. But you do get a glimpse that he takes it far more seriously than he may sometimes pretend.

He's let us in on the near-complete transformation of Tem to Jake, a point at which many an actor with less experience and a larger ego would have said the "nice to meet yous" and switched off the charm. Instead, "Come and keep talking," he says generously, heading off with the tape-deck in hand to the modest trailer with "Tem" taped up on a bit of card. He wants to let us see Jake Heke emerge fully formed.

"We're going to change the clothes now - and you might get a little bit closer."

We do. And conclude: hell of a nice guy, that Temuera Morrison.

But Jake Heke? He might be all in the tats and the haircut, but when he pulls on the steel-capped boots it seems like a very good time to leave.
--Weekend TimeOut, 17/10/98