KEY POINTS:
As a joke, I told the publicist to tell Paddy Wilson to get his hair done for the photograph. The return message said he's asked me to be prepared for his looking scruffy for the project "he is currently working on".
That was funnier than my joke. He
arrives at the Shakespeare Tavern looking exactly as he always does, which is scruffy. He won't mind me saying that. You can take a few liberties (he doesn't have any hair) when you've known somebody for 10 years.
When I say "known", I mean that I've seen Wilson at the Shakespeare Tavern for around 10 years and we have had numerous, amicable, conversations over those years, not one of which either of us can remember. "We sort of cross paths," he says. When I sat down to write some questions I realised that I know nothing about him other than that he's an actor who used to be a cop, who was in Blue Squad during the Springbok tour, that he likes a drink and that he can, after a few, get a bit shouty at people, which can give them a start because he's a big, brawny bloke. But he is always sweet. He mis-hears the shouty comment and says "I've shouted people?" Which pretty much sums up all of those previous conversations.
If people recognise him they probably say: "There's that guy on the tyre ads." In my house we always say: "There's Paddy on that tyre ad." Which is to say I probably know him only slightly better than anyone else who knows him as that guy on the tyre ads.
When I told a mutual friend I was going to interview Paddy he said: "He's a lovely man, and so talented." Well, yes, he is, I said, but he always just plays Paddy, doesn't he? "You're not going to say that to him, are you?" he said. Well, yes, I thought I might. For one thing it would be a good test of whether there's a Wilson I don't know: a hyper-sensitive actor who gets the huff over being accused of only ever playing himself. Most actors would. Wilson doesn't.
He is a good actor, I think, and he's very good in his first lead in a big telly series, Rude Awakenings which starts on TV One on February 9. He plays a bloke called Arthur Short whose wife has left him for another woman, leaving him with two teenage daughters. He has rented, for 20 years, the worst house in a Ponsonby St which has gentrified around him. Arthur is a socialist and bagpipes player who is always "lurching from trying to do the right thing to cocking it all up. He's a bit of a middle-aged, no-career dinosaur with a kind heart."
I thought, except for the no-career bit, that Arthur might have been written for Wilson but it wasn't, he had to audition for it. And I don't know if he's a socialist exactly - he was raised, like many New Zealanders of his generation, in a house with a picture of Mickey Savage on the walls and he believes in unions because he believes in fairness - but he doesn't care much about money and never has. He is 50 and doesn't own a house but rents an 1880s mansion in Henderson which he shares with hens and ducks, a dog, a cat and a muso flatmate.
It's never occurred to me to wonder why he drinks at the Shakespeare. He's just one of the cast of characters who comes and goes and knows everybody, in that passing in the pub way. But when I did think about it, it is an unlikely pub for an actor.
"I'd much rather be in pubs like this than trendy Ponsonby cafes. As an actor I meet more real people. When you're bringing a character to life, if I based it on people I see in Ponsonby cafes it would probably be based on another actor, you know."
He likes to be around people, "who have actually lived lives and fallen over and hit bad times and I also find they're the most generous. They're the ones who, if they've got 10 bucks, they'll give you five to get home. And that's the big reason I'm not establishing an anti-culture or anything but I was always comfortable here."
He says: "This isn't going to be all about my drinking at the Shakespeare is it?" Unfortunately not. I thought that his big telly part, and the fact that I've always been a bit nosy about him, would be a good excuse for a long, boozy lunch I could claim on expenses. But, no, which is very disappointing. He does have a good line on drinking , too good to leave out, and then hardly another word, promise. "I like the John Hurt thing when he left England and went to Ireland and they were asking him why he left England and he said, 'oh well in England they call me an alcoholic and in Ireland they call me an enthusiast.' So, yeah absolutely, I like a drink and I always have." Wilson has an English father (who left his mother with three boys when Wilson was 4) and an Irish mother, so you can see why he likes that story so much.
He had one beer, which I paid for, but which was in no way recompense (or revenge) for all those evil shooters he's made me drink over the years. Which he paid for. He's been skint, often, but you try stopping him buying you a drink. I imagine that his idea of a mortal sin - he was raised a Catholic and educated by nuns and priests in Wellington - would be skipping out on your round.
He doesn't want to be portrayed as someone who is always at the pub, not because he's precious - which he isn't at all - but "that's not all me".
Who is he then? "Well, I dunno. Who am I? I'm all sorts of bits and pieces. I like - what do I like? I like things like loyalty. I like things like the handshake being your bond and people giving their word. I think those things are important."
He always got on better, even when he was a cop, with people who were ever so slightly on the other side of the law. He did undercover work and when I ask if he was good at it, he says he was good in the sense that people trusted him enough to "come around and do all sorts of nefarious things at my place". But he hated it, really. "I felt like a Judas a lot of the time. I liked a lot of those people." I thought it might have been his first acting job, but he says that was "when I had to walk down Lampton Quay in my police uniform trying to pretend I knew what I was doing".
He is 50 and his working life has been odd and unplanned. He became a cop because his girlfriend was pregnant and they were getting married and he needed a proper job (he'd been a labourer.) And he played rugby with cops and they liked a drink. He left after 10 years, embittered, after he and another cop were prosecuted after what he says was little more than a scuffle at a party. There was a hung jury at the first trial and an acquittal at the second.
Another child later, his marriage was over and he went to Europe and did the red-blooded Kiwi male trip: running with the bulls; the beer fests. In London he thought - he has no idea why because he thought acting was "a bit gay" - he might do an acting course. He thought it would be like going to pottery classes. He went along to an improvisation evening, improvised being an overcoat in a cupboard - he can still do this splendidly - loved it and signed on for more.
He liked "the whole fact that you could, not become another person, but bring out a side of you. It's always got to be a part of you because that's all you've got. I found it cathartic and ... all sorts of things but they're all so cliched and I've heard a thousand actors say the same words."
He came home, started getting work and has had good times and lean times ever since. He is, in many ways, an unlikely actor but then he was an unlikely cop too. He has never hankered after stardom. He is happy to be "the third man through the door"; a Sam Peckinpah term. The first man is the hero, "and he's always narrow-eyed and square-jawed and good-looking. The second man is the hero's best friend and he's not quite as good-looking but still pretty good-looking. The third man through the door is either the bumbling friend who's the comic relief whose trousers fall down or doesn't get the girl or he's the villain who gets killed."
But now he has the lead. He looks faintly horrified. "Yeah, but it's the third man lead. You know, I don't think Arthur's a sort of Dr Love!"
No, that would have been quite out of character. And there's only so much shattering of expectations a girl can take. And I'll forgive him, just, for doing me out of a long, boozy lunch on expenses but only because, even in the sober light of day, he's still a real darling.