Upfront
Charles Mesure
by Fiona Rae
Kiwi actor in Hollywood.
Charles Mesure is standing in the glare of Tinseltown. With the big US networks having ordered more than 70 sitcoms and 50 dramas during pilot season, Mesure found himself playing a bad-boy rocker in a Pamela Anderson sitcom, a bad-boy priest in a supernatural drama and, as an aside, appearing in the big hit of the season, Lost, and the season finale of Without a Trace. It was the Anderson sitcom Stacked that got the go-ahead and Mesure, the British-born, Australian-trained actor who has spent all his working life in New Zealand – including three years as cop Kees Van Damm in Street Legal – suddenly has what’s known in Hollywood as “heat”.
So, what did you think when they said “Pamela Anderson sitcom”? It’s quite smart what [creator] Steve Levitan has done, because he’s taken all these assumptions about Pamela Anderson and he’s turned them on their head. You expect boobs and blonde hair jogging along the beach and he’s actually written a fairly witty and sophisticated sitcom. It’s very cleverly done, ’cause even though Pamela is the main attraction, it’s deliberately structured so that she doesn’t have to carry the show.
Was there an actual break that led to jobs in the US, or was it just one of those audition things? There were certainly no jobs on offer. I came here to do a fan convention for Xena: Warrior Princess and I met an agent who got all excited about the work that I’d done in New Zealand and he urged me to come out for pilot season and give it a shot. I figured that I’d had a great run in New Zealand, but I didn’t know how much more there would be. In a way, I’d done most of what there was to do. It sounds awful, but it wasn’t clear what my next gig in New Zealand would be. In certain quarters, it was suggested that I was getting a bit long in the tooth for New Zealand, anyway, so I thought I’d come here before I get too old to do it.
But you’re not that old. This is the bizarre thing. It’s a very ageist profession. I know that on Street Legal, my old boss Greg McGee used to go, “Oh yeah, the guys that are leading these TV shows are all older guys like Steve Bisley, like George Clooney, like yourself.” And I’m like, “Hang on, McGee, I’m 34! Bisley’s 54! Clooney’s in his forties!” In New Zealand, they seem to be hyper aware of age. It’s fantastic coming here, because all the guys who are leading shows are in their mid-thirties to mid-forties, so I’ve come here just at the right time.
Comedy isn’t something you’ve really done here. How are you finding it? It’s great. Again, with that ensemble of actors you have to be completely on the ball and completely at the top of your game, otherwise they’ll wipe the floor with you. Yeah, we don’t do a lot of comedy in New Zealand, eh? Half the auditions you go for here are for sitcoms and it’s a very specific style of writing and consequently a very specific style of acting, so you have to learn how to be good at it to make a living. It’s funny, at the ripe old age of 34, to find out that I’ve got a knack for it and it’s been good fun.
Did you do something specific to help you get in that sitcom groove? Yeah, everyone does classes here when you’re not working. So I did all kinds of stuff, audition preparation and auditions – just learning how to audition in LA was a huge thing for me. It’s incredibly different to the way we work in New Zealand. And of course you go to these audition classes and half of what you’re working on are sitcom scripts.
Directors often talk about rough and rugged Kiwi and Aussie actors. Have you heard that kind of talk, too? Yeah, people have jumped all over that. I guess I’m getting to a certain age where there’s a gruff, authoritative kind of thing that I can do quite well that a lot of the guys out here can’t really do. There are a lot of pretty boys and I’m not a pretty boy. When you’re here, you can see why someone like Russell Crowe has done so well.
There have been a huge number of sitcom pilots made – you might have lucked into the perfect moment in sitcom history. I’ve no idea what’s going to happen. We’re now into what they call the replacement season, where all these pilots are picked, then the network looks at what isn’t really working. It’s really blown me away to find out about this Hollywood politics. When something isn’t working, the network points the finger straight away.
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