'An 800-seater audience bursting into laughter at the same moment is a kind of sacred experience'

Despite a distinguished 40 year career Stephen Lovatt never had a “fire’ to be an actor when he first auditioned at the NZ Drama School, he says.

At the recent New Zealand Screen Awards Lovatt was awarded best actor in a series for his role as the abrasive Dr Emmett Whitman in Shortland Street.

His resume runs the gamut of New Zealand theatre, film and TV from Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules to a five year stint on Neighbours and his stage work includes the New Zealand classic – Bruce Mason's The End of the Golden Weather.

When he turned up for his audition at drama school in the 1980s, he knew little about the world of acting, he told RNZ’s Summer Weekends.

“I wasn't the one who was on fire with it. I'd been to a school where drama pretty much consisted of the first 15 getting dressed up as women and singing 'Paint Your Wagon',” he says.

But his slightly “crazed” audition went well, he says. He picked a modern piece from Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane and for his classic he performed a psalm.

“I picked the one that Boney M made famous ‘By the Rivers of Babylon, where we sat down.’

“But what people don't really remember about that poem is it finishes with incredible savagery... it ends with this almost like Mark Antony thing of, I will come for you and what you have done to me will return to you tenfold. It's real biblical.”

Lovatt went all in, he says, and drama educationalist Rona Bailey, who was hearing his audition, saw something.

“Rona Bailey said, why is it you want to come to drama school? And I said, I remember looking into this extraordinary sort of witchy poo woman's eyes. And the truth just sort of flew out of me.

“And I just said, ‘I've experienced a silence on stage, and it's always been accidental and I want to know how to do it on purpose.”

That was the moment that started and has sustained his career since, he says.

“It's not necessarily the silence. Laughter is the same thing. Because I was brought up in religion, it's that thing of communion with other humans, you know, and ritual and ceremony.

“And what it does to us as a creature. So, an 800-seater audience bursting into laughter at the same moment is a kind of sacred experience.”

The same principle applies in the fast turnaround world of television, he says.

“The thing about ritual and ceremony in that it is people sitting down at seven o'clock to watch the show, Okay, now a lot of people are streaming it, whatever.

“But they sit down and that is part of the ceremony. And they want to be with a show like Shorty. They want to be entertained with laughter, with observation, with what on earth, amazement.”

Lovatt has experienced the precarity of an actor’s life over the last 40 years, he says, but Covid was a particularly tough time.

“I came out of a particularly dark period coming out of Covid, which was true for so many people.

“I decided I'd give Uber driving a go. And it was one of those funny things, I guess, as far as resilience sort of thing going. I just knew I had to do something. I was getting really dark and lonely and lost and feelings of worthlessness.”

It became though, he says, an uplifting experience.

“I did it for about seven or eight months. It just lifted me up. And I just met all these amazing people. I had these beautiful experiences.”

Lovatt returned the stage at the end of last year in two one man shows; playwright Bruce Mason’s The End of the Golden Weather and Not Christmas, but Guy Fawkes. It was like “the closing of a circle,” he says.

“For a solid two and a half, maybe three weeks, I went onto that stage six nights a week and did my craft as well as I've ever done it.

“And none of it was accidental. It was free and it was easy, but it was also 40 years of honing and that was really pleasing.”