November 28, 2011

Toi Grad Rawiri Paratene wins Best Lead Actor   

Rawiri Paratene, Toi graduate and Kiwi acting legend, is on a roll at the moment. Probably best-known for his role in Whale Rider (Koro), he is also the first-ever Māori graduate from Toi, graduating from the acting course in 1972 and going on to lead Toi’s Performance for Camera Programme for three years.

And 2011 has been a good year for him! You’ve probably seen him gracing our television screens as Kaiteke in What Really Happened: Waitangi (TVNZ, 2011): and now he has capped that with an AFTA Award for Best Lead Actor in a Feature Film for The Insatiable Moon, currently playing nation-wide.

A first for director Rosemary Riddell – usually a District Court Judge – The Insatiable Moon is about Arthur, Rawiri’s character, who claims to be the second son of God. The rest of the world calls him mad. But he knows who he is, and gets on with the work he needs to do. As the blurb says, before he’s finished you will have fallen in love, laughed and cried, hoped and almost believed in him, and the film has won raves from the critics world-wide as well as another AFTA for Greg Johnson (best Supporting Actor) – and the prize for Best Foreign Film in the 2011 Moondance International Film Festival 2011.

Next up, Paratene features in the NZ International Festival of the Arts with his te reo production of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, which is then going on to represent New Zealand in a world first at London’s Globe theatre: Globe to Globe, a multi-lingual Shakespeare festival featuring 37 productions in 26 different languages from around the world.

Paratene has recently come from a six month-long season at the Globe, playing Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet, and he has a long association with Shakespeare that goes back to seeing a production of Hamlet at the Mercury Theatre when he was just 15. He calls it a “life-changing event”, and credits it with being the reason he originally got into acting: “I was mesmerised by the words, which spoke to me with clarity and relevance. They no longer sounded like a foreign language. I could understand what the play was about.” 

Troilus and Cressida features a 14-strong cast of many of our most respected Māori actors, specially created haka and waiata, and what has been described as an “exquisite” translation by Tūhoe writer Te Haumihiata Mason. The play, set during the Trojan wars, follows the love between a Trojan prince and maiden and features struggles of power, hierarchy and honour between some of history’s greatest characters. Paratene set up a new company to produce it, Ngākau Toa; he plays Pandarus, and it is directed by Rachel House and Wetini Mitai-Ngatai.

Read more:

See more on the festival production here  

Watch Paratene talking about his role in The Insatiable Moon in a ScreenTalk interview here

And view the complete list of AFTA winners here, complete with photos from the ceremony.