Coming from a very small country, it's always nice to see our own doing well.

I had a country upbringing in a predominantly Maori community, and that contrasted with a very multi-cultured arts community in the Aro Valley in Wellington: growing up around a lot of theatre and poets and writers and stuff.

Anyone who has a parent can relate to this idea of not quite understanding who your parents are or making up stories about them.

With some actors, you can tell, just from their different backgrounds and their different approaches to working, they would have just a natural conflict, just a sort of friction.

Quite often, intent on conveying how things can go wrong for a culture (science fiction) or an individual (horror) or all of magical creation (fantasy), works of fantastika often preclude comedy, because humor gets in the way of messages of doom or struggle.

To be honest, I never, ever thought I'd ever do comedy. I was so frequently cast early on as a high-born young man with... 'problems' and, later, as a heavy, from black-hatted western villains to the corporate raider to bad cops.

I have no problem in doing comedy, as I am happily consolidating my image of a comic actor.

Humor is so important to the American scene throughout history.